NASIG Newsletter

22nd CONFERENCE
STRATEGY SESSION 

Academic Journal Publishing
Peter Binfield, Journals Editorial Director, Sage Publishers; Zac Rolnik, now publishers; Kerry Cole, Head of Marketing and Sales, Portland Press; Cindy Brown, Production Manager, Medical Journals, Wiley-Blackwell
Reported by Jeanne M. Langendorfer

Peter Binfield spoke first about acquiring existing journals.  Publishers acquire journals to build more attractive sales packages, to improve the quality of content, to drive usage, to gain new readers, to break into new markets and to increase revenue.  Journals are acquired by temporarily assuming the contract for an existing journal, typically a society journal, or by outright purchasing of a title, usually from another publisher.  The prices paid range from one to six times their annual revenue.  Society titles often are leased for a set period of time, with the owner retaining editorial and content control.  Tools and services include online peer review software, author gateways, and author care communications.  Publishers produce these reports: usage data, financial, editorial, strategic, circulation, bibliographic data and revenues to other stakeholders. They maintain the integrity of the content by managing the peer review process, maintaining their online archive and checking for plagiarism and multiple publication.

Zac Rolnik described the process of launching a new journal.  Publishers network with potential authors by visiting campuses and attending conferences.  To discover topics that might lead to a new title, publishers monitor listservs, the news and the literature of the field; talk with their marketing, sales and customer service staff; conduct market surveys; and research underserved topics, new scholarly topics and new societies. Publishers find an editor-in-chief who is a research leader in the field, has good organizational skills, an established network and is willing to participate.  The editor might receive 2.5-10% of the royalties and a stipend up to $10,000.  Additional incentives include making an impact on and furthering research in their fields.  Usually, the publisher owns the journal.  The editorial board members are invited and should include researchers with a range of experience from around the world.

Cindy Brown described value-added publishing.  Services include: peer review systems customized for the client; adding digital object identifiers and XML for full-text search capability; copy editing, typesetting and proofing for errors; distributing pages electronically to authors; providing a proofing website and English-language editing services.  Brown presented in detail Wiley-Blackwell’s online early production workflow.  Author services and gateways allow authors to follow the article through the publishing process. Next, the steps taken by authors along with the services that publishers provide to the author at each of those steps were described.  Providing a digitized journal backfile for online access in perpetuity is highly desired by libraries.  There is a great demand on publishers to provide quality articles quickly and as economically and efficiently as possible.

Kerry Cole offered a sales and marketing view of academic journal publishing.  Marketing is “…an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders…” (American Marketing Association).  Cole described Portland Press as a publishing subsidiary of the Biochemical Society, which publishes five journals and three electronic products.  It is based in the UK, and has five staff, two of whom handle marketing and two of whom have sales and licensing responsibilities.  In the print world, prior to 1995, one person handled marketing and there was no sales staff. Customers were authors, subscribers, editors, and subscription agents.  With the onset of e-journals, librarians also became customers.  To learn their customers’ needs and the best ways to help them, the publisher attended conferences worldwide, ran focus groups, and visited and surveyed customers worldwide. Then they created marketing materials, improved their online journal platforms and account administration, offered consortial and package purchasing and addressed licensing issues.