Society and the “society publisher” Does ‘Value’ Have a Future?

Society and the “society publisher”Does ‘Value’ Have a Future? ASA Conference, 16-17 February 2009 Douglas LaFrenier Director, Publication Sales & Market Development American Institute of Physics

Who am I to say? • American Institute of Physics is a not-for-profit publisher, but not a Society of individual members; it provides services to 10 Member Societies and other scholarly publishers. • However, I have worked with Society publishers for nearly 20 years. • I also polled several Society publishing directors for this talk – which is really just a rumination on the state of affairs.

The issue • Why this is worth thinking about: Even in this world of aggregation, conglomeration, and Big Deals, most journals are Society publications and most Societies publish just a single journal. • And they feel threatened – by commercial publishers, by OA advocates, by online demands (costs go up) and library budgets (prices go down), and by new outlets for “community.” • Fun Fact: “The vast majority of freely available biomedical articles were published by societies using traditional subscription models.” – Journal of the MLA (reported by The Scholarly Kitchen blog)

The central question • Are the values related to Societies still perceived as “valuable”? • Not-for-profit, mission-driven • Close identification with “the community” and the science (serious, authoritative, purpose-driven) • Journal(s) truly represent the community (subscription revenue seen as a good library investment even when used for non-publishing items)

The context & concerns • The formation of societies of like-minded professionals is a natural process, often aimed at information-sharing through meetings and publications. • But is this still relevant in a time of social networking sites and online “communities”? • Before the rise of commercial academic-journal publishing, Societies often dominated their fields, and their journals became the core reading. • Now, competition for authors is fierce, Society journals are embedded in Big Deal packages, and Content is no longer King. • Library sales became the largest source of revenue for such Societies, even though the Societies were often ignorant of library issues.

The worldview • As little as Societies understood the library market in their own countries, their global view is worse. Budget procedures, funding agents, marketing channels, currency markets, local languages – who knew? • The needs of the market were usually lubricated by subscription agents that the Society barely acknowledged and rarely rewarded.

The irony • Online publishing – a boon in nearly every other way – seems to have flipped the equation for Societies. They may have been “more equal” in the print era. • Technology and expertise required much less of an investment (proofreaders much cheaper than programmers). • Being a “publisher” was much easier (publishers were publishers, not librarians or archivists or database providers or portals or linking targets or metadata repositories or “licensors”). • Fixed print production costs maintained a more level playing field with the big commercial publishers (except perhaps for purchasing paper). Postage equalized distribution costs.

On the other hand . . . • Online makes it easier to connect with authors (often members) by providing new services – e.g., alerts when a paper is cited. • Online makes publishing faster, which is much more important to authors than Open Access. • Online makes it easier to be “nonprofit” – little expense to be involved in HINARI- and INASP-type programs. • Online makes it easier to grow membership – and distribute journals – internationally. • But online is expensive and commercial publishers are beating Societies at the “advanced features” game.

Some of the issues today • Whose “mission” is it? (I.e., who’s responsible for the literature?)APS created PROLA, the first retrodigitized archive, and they do not sell it for “perpetual access.” Similarly AGU thinks it is the natural archivist of the geoscience literature, its “patrimony.” Or are these library roles, albeit with an institutional or national bias? • Online ubiquity – with their journals available everywhere online (despite the beliefs of OA advocates), have Societies lost their main benefit for members? • Unique – and alone. The Society could proudly dominate its field of interest and function independently of commercial interests. But this stand-alone attitude falters today, when pricing, sales, distribution, online hosting, etc., all seem to require a Big Brother partner.

What happens then? • Once a Society finds a big partner for hosting, sales, and distribution – once somebody else, often a commercial publisher, takes over pricing, access, and distribution decisions – what happens to the “values” of the Society publisher from the library point of view? • I mentioned 3 such values earlier . . .

Values, redux • Not-for-profit, mission-driven • Doesn’t seem to amount to much these days, when some commercial publishers have better pricing and access policies than many Societies. • Close identification with “the community” and the science (serious, authoritative, purpose-driven) • True, but everything is evidence-based now. (I.e., we use usage statistics, not reputation, to judge value.) • Journal(s) truly represent the community (subscription revenue seen as a good library investment even when used for non-publishing items) • Forget it. The pie has shrunk. Nobody gets a pass on this one anymore.

Conclusions • Societies are threatened by commercial publishers, by OA, and certainly by the economy today. • The values associated with Societies (quality, fair pricing, community-based) are eroding, too. • And values are clashing: Is OA “better” than traditional Society publishing? Who’s the good guy here? It’s the gunfight at the O.A. corral!

Fin Thank You. Questions? Comments? Contact dlafrenier@aip.org.

Society and the “society publisher” Does ‘Value’ Have a Future?