cssp presentation
TRANSCRIPT
Fighting on Three Fronts
Joseph J. Esposito
CSSPWashington, D.C.
April 27, 2013
Processed Media is a management consultancy
working in the areas of publishing, software, and
education. Clients include both for-profit and not-for-profit
organizations.
Topics
• How will the new open access mandates affect professional societies?
• How do I navigate our organization through a publishing environment dominated by huge commercial concerns?
• Is the management and governance structure of our society equipped to deal with pressing environmental issues?
Varieties of OA Mandates
• Mandated deposits into institutional repositories (Green OA)
• Stipulations by funding organizations (e.g., the Wellcome Trust)
• Government policies (e.g., recent statement from U.S. OSTP)
• Some mandates may include embargoes• Let’s not forget piracy (unmandated!)
Implications of Growth of OA
• Growing amount of literature available—putting increased pressure on search and discovery
• Likelihood of multiple versions of same material online—making usage harder to assess, driving down measurable accesses
• In some fields, migration of papers, even some of the finest, toward Gold OA services
OA Implications #2
• Rapid growth of new OA services to absorb all the new material
• Greater competition—likely to result in downward pressure on pricing and a need for greater investment in technology
• New premium on marketing• No clear path to long-term preservation• Overall, higher expenses and less revenue
But why not simply create our own Gold OA service and migrate our
business from subscriptions to the author-pays model?
New OA Service: Benefits
• Retains authors• Potentially can be additive to subscription
journals• Potentially Gold OA fees can be combined
with membership dues, creating a path to an enlarged membership
• “If we don’t do this, someone else will”
New OA Service: Limitations
• Competitive environment• Could cannibalize subscription revenue• OA revenues typically lag behind traditional
journals• Could challenge standards of peer review• More speculatively, likely to change the nature
of desirable content over time (e.g., more topical)
The second front: commercial behemoths (John Wiley, Springer,
Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Sage)
Structure of the Marketplace Today
• 85% of journals revenue derives from libraries (percentage varies by discipline)
• Libraries prefer to purchase aggregations• Large aggregations marginalize small publishers,
including many society publishers• Market is growing modestly, mostly
internationally• Largest publishers are well positioned to remain
dominant for the next several years
A Society’s Typical Path
1. Go it alone—no partner, use own tech2. Outsource tech, but remain independent3. Join a consortium4. Place journals under the umbrella of a
university press5. Place journals under the umbrella of a larger
not-for-profit entity6. Create an arrangement with a behemoth
The real issue for a society publisher today is how to get access to the
library budget, and increasingly the gateway to that income is controlled
by the largest commercial publishers.
The Third Front: Governance
• Need to be responsive to environmental changes—and to anticipate them
• Efficient decision-making• Open channel of communication between the
Board and the publishing management
HighWire Illustration
• Large group of all HW publishers• Presentation: How will OA affect your
publishing program?• Multiple requests for slide deck• Need to inform society management of
publishing issues• Concern that societies were not attentive to
business concerns
If governance is a problem, it is likely to become the defining
problem for the entire program.
Practical Steps
1. Empower a special committee to oversee publishing operations; put outsiders on that board/committee
2. Hire “high”—that is, seek publishing managers who are strongly qualified to run operations
3. Exercise bias in favor of personnel with at least some commercial experience
Practical Steps #2
4. Explore aggregating publishing operations with other societies
5. Explore Gold OA programs, tying publishing fees to society membership
6. Annual strategic planning review: place program into context of marketplace
7. In working with large partners, seek to retain rights for markets outside libraries
