Sales, licensing and marketing
Abstract:
This chapter reviews the sales, licensing and marketing activities undertaken by publishers, and highlights the value the publisher brings to the process of scholarly communication through these activities. It looks at the fundamental and emerging approaches to sales, licensing and marketing of academic content, and considers some of the metrics being used to evaluate the use of content, the development of pricing models and the efforts which the publisher makes to engage and retain customers.
Introduction
The market for scholarly and professional publishing is changing at a rate faster than ever previously experienced. The publisher adapts and reinvents its business models in order to survive (and thrive) and there is increased complexity in how content is licensed. At the same time, libraries are re-engineering their services to remain relevant to their research communities.
This chapter focuses primarily on journals rather than books. However, much of what is described below, such as pricing and customer engagement, applies to books and serials in equal measure. I make no attempt to recommend a way forward or best practice, but rather try to explain the options, the pitfalls and also the opportunities which a publisher faces if it adapts its approaches and business models in this ever changing environment.
Fundamentals of a publishing business
Regardless of the nature of the organisation every publisher requires a sustainable revenue stream, whether it is the commercial publisher providing an annual dividend for their shareholders, or the learned society or university press looking at least to break even on the cost of publishing and to reinvest any surplus to produce more and better content and to continue to provide a publishing service for their community. The principle is the same.
Any publisher needs to focus its commercial activities to answer the following questions:
1. What is my product offering?
2. How do I maximise the visibility of my content and provide a return for my stakeholders?
3. What do I need to know about my customer in order to supply more relevant content?
4. How is my brand (article, journal, book, company) perceived by customers (existing, potential) and how does that perception affect 2 and 3 above?
5. What can I do to influence brand perception and thereby increase sales, market share and improve market position?
There is growing competition for the attention of the reader. Content, which until recently could only be read in the publisher’s publications, can now be accessed elsewhere – the author’s personal repository, a subject repository, an institutional repository or via an e-print server (for example, the arXiv server, hosted at Cornell University, where authors post preprints of papers in the physical sciences).
The publisher needs to consider what value it adds to the content and how best to enhance and maximise that value for the author, the referee, the library and even the funding agency. This entails three key questions this chapter will review:
Understanding the market
The scholarly ecosystem
As in any business, it is critical to understand the needs of stakeholders and dynamics of the market, and this is no different for academic and professional publishers. While the ecosystem for scholarly content is highly complex, comprising a wide range of established and emerging fields of study, at its core it is very simple:
Researchers want their research to be recognised by their peers and therefore further their reputation and career.
By publishing the research and helping researchers to be recognised, the publisher generates revenue.
The library serves its community by providing cost-effective access to relevant teaching and research materials.
From the starting point in the late 17th century of only a handful of research papers, it is estimated that researchers from 218 different countries now produce over 1.5 million research papers per year (Royal Society, 2011), and the number of research papers produced grows annually. Researchers bemoan their inability to keep pace with all the relevant research. This complaint is not exclusive to the 21st century. For example, Sir Michael Faraday (1827) complained that, ‘it is certainly impossible for any person who wishes to devote a portion of his time to chemical experiment, to read all the books and papers that are published in connection with his pursuit’. One can only speculate what Faraday might say if he were a scientist active in the 21st century.
While scholarly communication is usually analysed along the author–researcher axis, much of the usage comes from students, particularly those taking higher degrees and those training for professional qualifications. As these students do not usually publish they will do little for the citation of articles (and hence for the Impact Factor, as described below), but their usage might ensure renewal of the subscription. Similarly, professional journals aimed at the practitioner or someone training for professional qualifications may be widely read but score low in any citation ratings.
The publisher wants to select articles which attract both citations and readership. One factor is often as important as the other, particularly in the case of a new journal which needs to establish its credentials within its respective community of readers and authors. However, the publisher does not always have the luxury, in terms of production budget, to choose papers based on both merits. As usage becomes increasingly important as a factor to assess the value of a publication to teaching, training and research-intensive institutions, more highly utilised publications will benefit.
The library performs a number of important functions in supporting researchers (many of which mirror the functions of the publisher):
Knowledge of the content. The library wants to know what content is available in order to best serve its community.
Support research. The library wants to offer content which will reinforce the research interests of its community.
Value. The library wants any acquisition to be cost-effective and provide its community with the best and most comprehensive service it can afford.
Cost-effective. The library wants to be able to justify its investments with evidence-based data:
Quality. The library cares about brand and the values associated with the brand. The reputation of the brand (publisher, journal) and previous purchase, user experiences may be taken into account when considering the next purchase.
In fulfilling its role, the library often struggles to provide access to all the materials required by the researcher, but this is no recent phenomenon. Earlier in this book, Robert Campbell provides an example from the 1920s of a large university library (Cornell), ‘suffering because of the increasing volume of publications and rapidly rising prices’, and their inability to keep up with demand from researchers (Okerson, 1986).
When an institution complains it has no budget, it does not mean there is no funding. A typical university library in a developed economy has an annual acquisitions fund in the millions of dollars. However, it may not have enough to acquire everything requested by the researchers. One of the roles of the publisher in working with libraries is to help satisfy researchers’ demand for content whilst maintaining a sustainable business.
How academic and professional content is purchased
Scholarly content is purchased in a variety of ways by research institutions.
Departmental library
Departmental libraries specialise in purchasing content around a particular discipline. In universities, it is not uncommon for library services to be distributed around faculty or even departmental libraries with a central library responsible for acquiring multi-disciplinary works, content which faculties cannot fund by themselves. This parallel library process, often referred to as the two-track library system, still prevails in older research institutions.
For example, the Ludwig Maximillian University is one of Germany’s oldest universities, established in Bavaria in 1472. The university library system operates more than 100 libraries, consisting of a central library, a small number of centralised faculty libraries and more than 80 ‘student libraries’ supporting every discipline taught at the university. Funding is distributed across all 100 + faculty and student libraries, leaving each library with a relatively small acquisitions fund, even though cumulatively it has one of the largest acquisition budgets in Germany.
Central library
The central library comprises either a single library or a small number of large departmental libraries centrally managing acquisitions for the entire institution.
The level of purchasing authority delegated to the Central Library can vary depending on geographical location. Typically an academic library in North America has more freedom to act than its counterparts in Europe and more again than those in Asia.
Library consortia
Consortia license content on behalf of multiple institutions within a region, country or even across borders. There are more than 350 purchasing consortia in 98 countries, acquiring e-books, journals and databases. (Source: Consortium Directory Online, 2011). Consortia fall into several types:
The first type is centrally funded, where funds are typically set aside or removed from existing library budgets to fund access for all institutions in the licence. The consortium pays the entire licence fee, including (a) the value of pre-existing subscriptions, (b) fees for new members and (c) the access fee for all additional content. These three elements comprise the Annual Licence Fee.
The second type is where the access fee for additional content is funded centrally and previously held subscriptions remain the responsibility of the individual institutions.
The third type of consortium simply acts as a negotiating agent. No new funding is made available and the licence is negotiated centrally. Fees are payable from existing budgets by individual institutions and membership is optional.
It is notable that funding agencies are creating their own central purchasing services, in order to acquire content directly from the publisher on behalf of member institutions. For example, JISC Collections was established by the UK Higher and Further Education funding councils to support the procurement of digital content for education and research in the UK. Since the 1990s, JISC Collections (and its predecessors) has acquired rights for databases, e-books and journal archives and has pioneered the introduction of electronic national site licences for journal content for universities and colleges in the UK.
Use of metrics in the purchasing decision
An increasing number of metrics are being used to support/inform the library purchasing decision:
The decision regarding which journal to purchase or maintain within a research institution is linked (normally) to the interests of the community being served. When evaluating the addition or removal of a journal or e-Book the library needs to consider how the content is being used, in terms of demand for the content (full-text downloads) but also in terms of research support for the journal. The purchasing institution requires the tools by which it is able to assess the real value and impact of the content.
Usage
One important trend in trying to evaluate value between publishers is to assess the comparative cost per download (CpD) of the publisher’s entire content and of all library holdings. CpD can be defined as the cost of purchasing the content divided by the total number of full-text downloads.
As it is important to be clear what ‘usage’ is being measured when basing one’s purchasing decisions on usage data – downloading or viewing the PDF or XML file of the article or book chapter; downloading the abstract or perhaps just the references – stakeholders have worked together to address this issue, through such initiatives as:
Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) was established as a cross industry initiative for libraries, publishers and funders to understand usage across all content types –books, journals, databases and multimedia. COUNTER provides codes of practice for standards and protocols to be used by publishers and libraries when counting usage.
SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative Protocol ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2007) is a model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data, and is intended to replace the time-consuming process of manually collecting and compiling usage data reports. For example, one recent (2011) implementation of the SUSHI Protocol is JUSP, JISC’s (UK) Usage Statistics Portal, which aims to provide a ‘one-stop shop’ for UK university libraries to use publisher download usage reports.
The existence of Project COUNTER protocols and the SUSHI standard for harvesting usage data realises what Franklin (2005) could only dream of – ‘the ability to reduce variation in different vendor usage reports by applying a standard protocol and harvesting that data systematically, making it possible to accurately compare cost per use for electronic resources across vendors and publisher’. Funding agencies and their bodies [e.g. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (JISC) in the UK] are already moving away from simply measuring quantitative measures such as CpD towards a more sophisticated and informative analysis of ‘return on investment’ relating to content purchases.
Impact
Although it has been subject to some criticism, the Impact Factor (Thomson Reuters) is still widely regarded as the standard measure for quality and importance for any research journal, influencing not only where to publish but also what to buy. The Impact Factor, first developed by Eugene Garfield in the early 1960s, today indexes more than 8000 journals across all disciplines in order to calculate the average number of times a paper in a journal is cited.
The publisher, hoping to persuade the library to add a journal, must understand the perceived value of the Impact Factor, how long it can take for a new journal to receive an Impact Factor and the variation depending on subject matter (the temporal distribution of citations in Mathematics tends to be longer than in other, related disciplines), and the type of content in the publication. When compared with research papers and letters, review articles receive more citations. A new journal may require several years of citations before receiving its first Impact Factor and the resulting lack of Impact Factor can make any acquisition decision difficult for a library to justify.
Usage is not the sole factor, or even at times the most important factor, when it comes to deciding what to purchase, retain or cancel. During a workshop at a US library conference in 2010, I asked a number of university librarians to make a choice of cancelling one of the following journals:
a. A broad subject journal which has a low CpD and is used extensively by the graduate and undergraduate community
b. A specialist journal with a very high CpD and much lower use by a limited research group within the university but one of the researchers happens to be the institution’s sole Nobel Prize winning scientist.
Regardless of the low cost per download, each of the librarians asked chose to retain journal b) and cancel a) the broad-subject, high-use journal in favour of the specialist journal, but emphasising that the publisher and library must consider a variety of options when determining on the continued use of an electronic resource within that institution: what to retain (high usage), what to cancel (low usage – but not always) and what to add or reinstate.
The development of pricing models
Licensing and the Big Deal
In scholarly publishing, licensing can mean many things. Content can be licensed in different ways – to copyright agencies, individual libraries and consortia, for teaching purposes and to be made available in new technologies. Later in this book, Mark Seeley and Lois Wasoff look at copyright and matters pertaining to copyright licensing. This section will therefore focus on the challenges and opportunities of licensing content to libraries and consortia.
Emergence of the Big Deal
Shortly after journals became available on the internet, publishers began to offer bundled packages of content. These bundles are referred to as the ‘Big Deal’. The publisher offers the library a large volume of content at a substantial discount and in return the library commits to maintaining its print and electronic holdings with the publisher. Many would assume that the Big Deal applies only to the very large content collections offered by a small number of large, commercial publishers, but by definition the Big Deal can apply to any aggregation of content, usually from a single publisher and regardless of the number of titles. There are big deals and there are bigger deals, it is simply a matter of scale. The first Big Deals date back to the late 1990s with the licences offered by Academic Press (now part of Elsevier) and Science Direct (also Elsevier).
When licensing content in a Big Deal, the purchasing institution wants to assure that:
usage is extended to as many users as possible
the CpD is within acceptable parameters
access will be maintained after cancellation
statistics can be provided to support the purchase decision
The CpD level quoted can be a key metric in agreeing this kind of licensing deal, depending on whether it is used simply for validation purposes, or as a comparison against other costs of accessing the same version of the content (such as pay-per-view), or as a stick to negotiate on price (when the target CpD can be as high or low as the purchasing negotiator wants it to be).
Model licences
Since the arrival of electronic journals in the mid-1990s, licences have become an essential part of defining the rights and duties of the buyer and seller in relation to electronic content. The original model licences were sponsored and developed in the 1990s by subscription agents preparing for the anticipated shift from print to electronic.
The publishing industry consultant John Cox has produced six different model licences covering a variety of scenarios, including Single Academic Institution, Academic Consortia, Public Libraries, Corporate and other special libraries, and E-book and journal archive purchases (Cox, 2009).
This was in addition to the considerable work done in defining a possible model licence by the UK Publishers Association together with the JISC, by the American Library Association to establish principles to license electronic journals, and by the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) in defining the early versions of the academic consortium licence.
These licences have since developed and extended their scope beyond simply journals, covering databases, book and journal archives, backsets, reference books and other e-books. They continue to evolve to reflect changes in the technology and changing methods of teaching, the increased internationalisation and distribution of higher education and increasing demands for text or data mining and negotiated open access rights as part of their content purchasing agreements.
The work done by Cox and others has facilitated a growth in content licensing to consortia, such that today revenue from consortia sales (the Big Deal) forms a large proportion of many academic and professional publishers’ revenue streams. There has also been considerable discussion on the future of the Big Deal. Some argue that ending the (large publisher) packages is the only way for a library to save costs in an increasingly challenging economic environment, while others insist that the sheer scale of content licensed and the ability to predict pricing are too important to discard.
Tiered pricing
Publishers have placed strong reliance on subscription income, the model for which has remained largely unchanged for over 300 years. A publisher would typically set two prices for a journal: (a) the institutional price and (b) the discounted price for society members or other private individuals. This very simple model applied perfectly well in a print world with no electronic access.
As soon as journals went online, the publisher witnessed a threat to their traditional income as institutions cancelled multiple copies of journals held in libraries and departments. As long as the content was available for the entire organisation (multiple sites, international locations) one licence would therefore suffice.
Tiered pricing was seen as a way of establishing a fair price for the use of the electronic version of the publication. For example, in 2001, the American Physical Society (APS) was among the earliest publishers to adopt a tiered pricing model. APS saw changes in their revenue streams; article charges had recently been eliminated and the availability of electronic journals led to cancellations of multiple subscriptions. In order to establish a fair pricing method, APS introduced a five-tier system based on the research size of the subscribing institutions, with large government research establishments, large corporate organisations and research-intensive post-doctoral institutions at one end of the pricing scale, and small undergraduate teaching colleges at the other.
Publishers selling to libraries in the US benefit from the US Carnegie Classification, which categorises institutions by research size and uses publicly available and audited data to group institutions. Although there are similar classification schemes in place elsewhere (e.g. JISC bands in the UK) they remain few and far between. Consequently, it is left to the publishing and research community to establish new, equitable and, importantly, fully justifiable ways to tier customer pricing.
Chesler and King (2009) describe the ‘guiding principles’ which the American Chemical Society (ACS) used to introduce a populated tiered pricing model. The absence of any Carnegie-type classification outside the US, and the fact that even in the US the Carnegie classifications had ‘variations in institutional demographics’, meant that ACS had to consider a number of additional factors in order to classify customers into their respective and appropriate bands:
Relevance, as measured by demand for the Journal (including relative usage patterns).
The type of research institution.
Economic strength of the country, using World Bank Classifications for each country, ranging from high to low income.
Costs and institutional budget, as suggested by an institution’s article output. The more papers published, the more resources required in that institution.
Utility, as measured by Impact Factor, with the assumption that the higher the Impact Factor, the greater the demand and usage of the content and of the research generated.
However, the path to establishing tiered pricing is not always without danger. Rapple (2011) explains the phases which a publisher must go through to transition to a tiered pricing model, which include:
Data audit – to place the customer in the correct tier, one needs to understand the customer data.
Market research – what is happening elsewhere in the competitive space.
Data cleansing – Chesler and King refer to this as ‘data hygiene’. It becomes a business process rather than simply a one-off activity completed in preparation for a tiered pricing model.
These responsibilities need careful consideration by publishers, given the need to review pricing tiers in line over time due to changes in the market and at an institution. The publisher must ensure that the pricing tiers are reviewed regularly, adjusting the institution bands where necessary both up and down, particularly if there is a major change in research interests. Publishers operating a tiered pricing policy must also maintain a data infrastructure (such as acquiring relevant content, market research, analytical tools and staff) to facilitate the assessment of bands. The publisher must instill confidence that sufficient consideration has gone into the methodology used to calculate the price bands in an open and equitable manner.
Open Access business models
Open Access (OA) has only existed as a concept in academic and professional publishing for a relatively short period of time, but despite this fact a total of 7036 peer-reviewed journals or nearly one-quarter of all published journals were categorized as OA at the end of 2011 [according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Lund University Libraries].
Many different business models have started to evolve:
Fully OA, with article processing charges and no journal subscription fees, where 100 per cent of journal revenue is funded by author charges.
Hybrid OA, which enables a journal with content behind a pay-wall to make certain articles free to read.
Open Access Consortium, which negotiates publication charges on behalf of a larger community. This is referred to also as a Collaborative Purchasing Model. An example of this is the SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) consortium managed by CERN, which aims to re-direct library funding from traditional journal subscriptions towards the payment of OA charges in certain subscription-based journals. To fund author charges, SCOAP3 members are expected to reduce existing subscription expenditure either by cancelling titles or through publishers reducing subscription prices.
Institutional Membership Schemes, such as those offered by BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which enable institutions to anticipate publication in particular journals by pre-paying or offering discounts on the publication charges. The scheme acts like a membership subscription and is re-assessed every one or two years.
Funding agency-supported OA journals, where funding agencies create their own journal for their funded research to appear. For example, the journal eLife, announced in November 2011, has been established as a ‘top tier, open access research journal’ supported by three funding organisations – the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA), the Max Planck Society (Germany) and The Wellcome Trust (UK). It is expected that once the journal is established, funding will switch away from the seed funding provided by the three funding agencies towards an author pays model.
Advertising or sponsorship-based journals, more likely in well-funded areas such as medicine or pharmaceutical science.
Institutional subsidy, where an institution financially supports the publishing activity carried out by either the library or a group of researchers.
Hard copy sales used to fund publication charges, where the journal is available online free of charge but charges are made for printed copies. For example, the British Medical Journal has made research articles free online whereas it still charges for the print version.
Publishers, as well as funding agencies and researchers, want a model which is sustainable. Few publishers oppose the principle of funded open access (Gold OA) and most expect to see an increase in the number of OA papers published. Although OA may be requested by authors and their funding agencies, it is far from being a simpler model and the transition to a more OA-based business model can impact on the publisher’s cash flow and cost base, particularly in smaller, more niche publications.
While subscriptions are traditionally pre-paid at the beginning of a year and processed en masse, the cost of processing and supporting article charges can be significantly greater. A single article may require partial invoices to be sent to multiple authors, not unusual in papers from large collaborations, while article fees are not pre-paid so an element of credit control is required. Moreover, the article charge is often an ad-hoc, one-time transaction with the full value taken only once the article is published. The subscription relationship, on the other hand (assuming the quality of publication is appropriately high), can last many years with a predictable proportion of subscription revenue taken each month. By operating an Institutional Membership scheme and allowing institutions to prepay author charges, it affords the publisher an element of predictability and stability from OA revenue, if only for the period during which the licence is in place.
It is too soon to say whether OA publishing models will become dominant in academic and professional publishing. Much has been written in recent years on the economics of OA publishing. Houghton and Oppenheim (2010) and Hall (2010) assess the financial merits and impact of OA publishing and take contrary positions in determining the economics of OAs and its long-term viability. Withey et al. (2011) review the economics for a university press to sustain scholarly publishing in an increasingly open environment.
The role of the publisher in adding value
Earlier in this book, Green and Cookson explain the services which the publisher needs to provide in order to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment. We should assess some of the commercial services which the publisher can provide. Before addressing the topic further, let us review what ‘marketing’ means in the process of scholarly communication.
Marketing and brand
The marketing function for academic and professional publishing is not just a department with a ‘Marketing’ label; rather, marketing is its core business. Each piece of communication reinforces the brand, whether it is the publisher’s own (corporate) brand, the journal, the book series or the book itself, even the journal article or book chapter (the product brand). Each communication is an engagement to action – submit a paper, commission a new book, act as a referee, become an expert consultant (e.g. journal board member) to support the brand, sample the content and then buy it.
Marketing in an academic and professional publishing context consists typically of the following functions:
Sales and customer support – global reach, in-house sales staff, sales channel management, pre- and post-sales customer support, pricing, licence management.
Library- or institution-facing marketing – libraries, consortia, funding agencies.
Author-facing marketing – board members, authors, referees, funding agencies. Goals can vary from attracting more papers, or encouraging referee engagement, to encouraging adoption and support of content offered (journal champion, textbook adoption).
Corporate marketing – a cross disciplinary service which supports the corporate, journal and article brands. The PR service (public or press relations) is an important function of any corporate marketing service. Good press, and by good I mean appropriate, relevant and targeted press coverage, can increase awareness for the author and their work. The researcher wants to be recognised by the respective research community. An effective PR activity will accelerate the process of awareness and recognition.
Data marketing – understanding the customer and all engagements with the publisher. The publisher ensures that it has the appropriate systems and processes in place to capture customer data, manage rights correctly and adhere to any Data Protection rules which might apply in that market (e.g. opt-in, opt-outs). The data marketing function will ensure that data quality is maintained, thus reducing any wastage or failure in communication.
Usage marketing – the publisher wants to ensure that content usage is as high as possible and that purchasing institutions are able to extract the maximum value from the content. This may not necessarily be a department or responsibility of an individual but a maxim for the organisation. For example, enhancing the technology used to deliver content is a direct attempt by the publisher to improve usage. The publisher wants ‘stickability’ of content, particularly for the reader referred from a search engine such as Google. Once the reader reaches the site, the publisher needs to find ways of keeping that user, and increasing usage for other content. Recent developments on the Web have enabled the use of ‘semantic technologies’, which allow the publisher and reader to better describe the content and link the content more accurately with other similar content elsewhere on the site. By making the technology more interesting or attractive for the reader it can positively affect usage in the same way that a reader awareness campaign, PR campaign or referral campaign might.
Market research – the publisher, regardless of size, needs to support investment decisions with evidence or relating to their customer requirement and to the markets in which it operates.
Social media – without doubt, social media tools are starting to have an impact on the scientific workflow. Rowlands et al. (2011) produced the results of an extensive survey of 2000 researchers which investigated the use of social media in the scientific workflow. This 2011 report highlights how quickly social media tools (such as Facebook, Twitter, blogging, YouTube) have been embraced by researchers to disseminate and discover research results. The publisher has had to quickly acquire the skills and techniques to make best use of these new media, promoting scholarly content using videos on video management sites such as YouTube, creating Facebook profiles for certain types of content or communities, encouraging or even commissioning the use of blogs to draw attention to certain disciplines and content types, and the creation of community portals to promote content in a given discipline or geographical sector.
Managing sales, licensing and marketing activities
Larger (commercial and society) publishers tend to have economy of scale, global reach, negotiating skills and general commercial expertise. They employ staff with specialist knowledge of licence negotiation and detailed knowledge of the library market to manage the consortia and library licensing process. They also ensure that any third-party content represented by them is sold in exactly the same manner as their own.
Smaller publishers are generally unable to employ similar levels of sales and marketing expertise, and so they tend not to have the internal capacity or commercial capability required to license content effectively to consortia, or to deal with the end-users directly. Contract publishing organisations offer the small to medium-sized publisher the kind of global reach and marketing resource which they would struggle to achieve without significant investment in staff and expertise. Small publishers may also require a subscription agent to manage the library engagement on their behalf.
One notable approach to addressing the imbalance in consortia negotiations is The ALPSP Learned Journals Collection (ALJC), which acts as a consortium club to help smaller publishers to sell content licences. This initiative enables a group of publishers to aggregate their content and, via an intermediary, sell a combined package to consortia and libraries. As of December 2011, ALJC contained 1070 journals in nine subject disciplines from 47 publishers.
Securing sustainable income
For a publisher to maintain or grow a customer base, it needs to invest in resources which can maintain and even increase sales, market presence, visibility, etc. Although the investment in acquiring a subscription can be high compared with the cost of the journal product, the subscription relationship can last many years and provide a very positive return to the publisher and stability of income. Therefore, as long as one takes a medium- to long-term view, the investment required to acquire a new subscription or indeed to maintain a subscription can be fully justified.
Let us consider some of the factors which will give the publisher the best possible chance of reaching the target audience, acquiring and retaining the subscription or licence.
Global reach
Academic and professional publishing is a global business so the publisher must provide the infrastructure and international channels to ensure the content and service is available as widely as possible. For example, in the case of IOP Publishing, UK, there are customers – including libraries, readers, authors, referees – in more than 120 countries (as of December 2011) and thanks to ‘subscription aid’ initiatives such as Research4Life, INASP and eIFL, readership extends to more than 150 countries. The UK, despite being the home market for the Institute of Physics, represents a small proportion of revenue, readership and author/referee base. This is typical for most medium- to large-sized society and commercial professional and academic publishers.
Discoverability
The publisher ensures that the metadata describe the content accurately and are interoperable across a variety of platforms, making their content as easily and widely discoverable as possible.
Distribution and dissemination
Not only must the content be discoverable, it must be accessible. The publisher needs to invest in content delivery systems (journal or e-book platforms) or outsource the content to external providers (e.g. High Wire, Metapress, Ingenta, Silverchair and Atypon).
New markets and new customers
The publisher needs to ensure that the content is available in whatever form the reader may want to access it, including PDF, HTML, XML and EPUB. Book publishers need to produce content in multiple formats depending on the target user – MOBI for Kindle, HTML for search engines, ONIX for book distributors and NLM XML for future reading devices.
In order to reach the largest possible market, the publisher needs to consider how to make content available and to determine the value of offering content via third-party platforms. The publisher may choose to be platform-agnostic as to the location of the final article as long as the content is discoverable and any citation is credited back to the publication. Aggregation service providers would argue that they serve a different community from the publisher and therefore the risk of possible cannibalisation is low.
Customer engagement and retention
Here we address the challenge of understanding and attracting readership, what has been referred to as ‘attention marketing’ (Esposito, 2010).
Market research and customer insight
Industry and customer data come in many forms and sources:
The Publisher may choose to commission its own research to determine its market share, its market perception or simply gain an understanding of how its content or its service is used. To develop its products and services, the publisher must first determine how it is being used – what is the user experience and what can be done to enhance the experience.
Shared research data. As part of their services to support member publishers, trade associations (such as ALPSP, STM, SSP) conduct regular research studies on different aspects of academic and professional publishing, the findings for which are then distributed to member organisations as part of their membership. (Research reports can also form a useful revenue stream for the trade association by selling reports to non-members.)
More general research reports are published by specialist research organisations such as EPS Outsell, Key Perspectives and Publishing Research Consortium. These organisations produce reports ranging from broad industry surveys to specialist analysis and comment on particular aspects of professional and scholarly publishing.
Governmental and intergovernmental organisations such as UNESCO, OECD and National Science Foundation (NSF) produce annual reports containing detailed statistics on the size of the research marketplace, including total numbers of researchers and growth trends by country/region.
The publisher needs to invest time and money to engage with the customer, researching the customer’s current and future requirements, understanding research workflows and identifying a role for itself in that process.
Larger publishers have the benefit of economy of scale – expert staff, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, funding for resources, marketing collateral and general promotion. However, the smaller publisher, in particular the smaller society publisher, knows how to serve their community, which may gravitate around their respective society. This can be achieved by offering a focused suite of products and services that the community will consume, such as in-house publications, member magazines and web pages, society meetings such as conferences and workshops, and subject working groups and by representing the society itself, acting on its Council or other governing bodies. The smaller society (and publisher) is also well positioned to identify new research areas, current and future trends in their particular discipline and to produce new services to support these new research areas.
Bringing all relevant customer data together in one place, typically using CRM-type systems to establish a ‘data warehouse’, facilitates a detailed analysis of the customer’s engagement with the publisher, analysing trends, identifying any opportunities or gaps in the service provided. Important criteria for a particular institution include:
How many papers does the publisher receive from the institution?
Which content does the institution have access to and what are researchers trying to use?
How many authors, referees, board members, librarian advisors?
What is the usage/submission rate compared with similar institutions – size, geography, research interests?
This kind of CRM functionality is no longer the exclusive domain of the larger publisher. Services exist which the small to medium-sized publisher may be able to exploit with their otherwise limited budgets. For example, Mastervision (from Datasalon) provides insight into a Publisher/Customer relationship by collating data on publishing transactions, including: marketing campaigns; article views; alerts; member data; author data; referees and board members; subscription data; user registration data; consortia membership data; and any other structured data. Mastervision’s search tools then look for relationships within the data to identify segments and trends.
Data hygiene
One particular problem which the publisher must face when trying to understand its customer relationships is ambiguity. When trying to understand how many authors, referees, subscriptions and board members which the publisher has from any given institution it needs to know how that institution is described, which naming conventions are used and which department belongs to which institution.
One often sees the following affiliation on a journal paper: ‘Department of Physics, Cambridge’. How can the researcher be sure this is Cambridge in the UK and not say MIT or Harvard, both located in Cambridge, Massachusetts?
Tools and standards are being developed to resolve (or at least reduce) this institutional identity problem. For example, the Ringgold database (http://www.ringgold.com) was created to help with the process of institutional disambiguation. The publisher assigns the relevant Ringgold master name to any given ‘transaction’ in order to track relationships more accurately.
Similar services utilising improvements in web technology have been developed by publishers for use by researchers to engage with their respective research communities. For example, in 2010, the American Institute of Physics launched AIP UniPHY, a website which enables researchers from the physical sciences to identify possible connections within their scientific community, identifying researchers who may possess the expertise required for future collaborations. Another example, pre-dating AIP UniPHY, is BiomedExperts (Collexis Holdings, now part of Elsevier) which uses the PubMed database to connect nearly 1.8 million researchers worldwide according to publication profiles and research interests.
The problem of author ambiguity is, however, even greater than that of institutional ambiguity. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database (June 2011) there is a global community of 6.2 million active researchers in 16 000 organisations and 27 million researchers globally (excluding undergraduate students). Many commercial publishers have created proprietary systems to help with author identification, such as Scopus Author Identifier (Elsevier), Wiley-Blackwell Author Services, Distinct Author Identification System (Thomson Reuters) and Scholar Universe (ProQuest).
In order to better identify more exactly who the author is, and to ensure interoperability, new services and standards are being developed to address author disambiguation, including:
ORCID (http://www.orcid.org), which aims to remove any author/contributor name ambiguity in scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers which the researcher uses during their career.
The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) Agency, which has created an ISO standard (Draft ISO Standard – ISO 27729) to connect research information to the individual.
These new, cross-industry initiatives should allow publishers and researchers alike to forge better relationships. By embracing standards such as ORCID the author ensures that their work is correctly attributed now and in the future and the publisher has the data to better understand the author and their work.
The ecosystem for scholarly publishing binds the researcher with the publisher in a very real way. The benefits of the publishing process are mutual. The researcher needs visibility and the publisher needs revenue to achieve whatever commercial or altruistic goals it may have. In scholarly and academic publishing, the researcher is the producer and the publisher is the diffuser – the system does not work if either party is missing.
The evolving role of the sales intermediary
Another key player in publisher–customer relationships is the sales intermediary (subscription agent), who typically performs many functions on behalf of publishers and customers, for example:
As the publisher’s official representative acting in matters relating to content sales, negotiation, invoicing, debt collection, business development and customer support.
Sales only but no invoicing. This is what was typically referred to as the ‘Publisher’s Agent’ in the old print world. This agent is remunerated on the basis of sales generated. Costs may include an optional retainer fee to cover upfront costs. This intermediary would not engage in either invoicing or debt collection and the customer decides on the appropriate method of being invoiced – e.g. via a subscription agent or directly by the publisher.
Whereas the role of the subscription agent was clearly defined in the print-only world (‘buying intermediary’, with improved processing and administering of print orders), the arrival of electronic-only content changed the market dynamic.
This opens up questions of what role a subscription service can play when the library can license all content electronically directly from the publisher, or indeed of whether traditional subscription services (such as cataloguing, print consolidation and managing claims) are still relevant when the content is supplied electronically?
Managing e-collections and providing access for the research community generates a lot of administrative effort. As more content is born electronic or retro-converted, it becomes difficult for library staff to know precisely which titles are available to them. They may know which journal or book titles are included in a particular package but not necessarily to which years they have an entitlement. It can become difficult therefore for a library to provide services which assist in linking and discovery of content when they are unable to inform users as to which content is available if they are not always sure themselves. There are still thousands of publishers with thousands of products to sell. Only the format – electronic as opposed to print – has changed.
Hence, subscription agents can still provide an important role for the library, but it is a role which continues to evolve. The subscription agent, if engaged correctly, can provide an important service to institutions by:
managing their e-collections and entitlements – helping with processing new orders, renewals and claims;
providing accurate and timely pricing information;
providing usage data (SUSHI/COUNTER-compliant);
providing assistance with publisher negotiations, cost comparison calculations and sophisticated, pre-populated ERM services (Source: The Association for Subscription Agents: Library Choice http://www.subscription-agents.org/library-choice).
There is also still a market for the specialist sales agent, particularly for the smaller publisher unable to justify the cost of recruiting in-house. Geographically distributed sales agents will have specialist knowledge of their respective markets. If the agent agrees to operate on a commission-based sales basis, then the risk is minimised.
Conclusion and outlook
There is no crystal ball to predict the future, but there are certain truths which remain with us:
1. The author still wants recognition for their work.
2. The researcher wants to further their career.
3. There is still a role for peer review and quality associated with journal brands, regardless of the business model applied.
4. Funding agencies fund research and want their efforts to be recognised.
5. There is still a requirement for content distribution and quality control.
6. Research output is growing at a faster rate than scientists can absorb.
7. Even the largest research libraries are unable to acquire all the content its researchers require.
8. The subscription model will continue to exist, albeit in a different form from previously.
These truths apply today as much as they have at any time in the past. The Web has just changed expectations among the respective stakeholders.
New methods of accessing content will continue to emerge (e.g. DeepDyve, which has been described as the iTunes for academic and professional content) and successful publishers must find ways to engage more closely with their researchers, to develop business models that provide the level of global visibility researchers and their funding institutions require, and to adapt their business practices to embrace changing business models (such as OA) in a way which is sustainable in the long term.
Acknowledgments and sources of further information
I would like to thank Mark Ware, Lead Analyst, Outsell Inc., and Bob Campbell (Co-Editor of this book) for their assistance in providing references and other source material for this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the publishing industry consultant John Cox on his invaluable work in developing Model Licences for academic and professional content and for the countless hours saved by publishers not having to reinvent the licensing wheel ad infinitum.
General sources
Consortium Directory Online http://www.frontlinegms.com/6.html
General overview of scholarly publishing practice by John Cox: http://www.alpsp.org/Ebusiness/ProductCatalog/Product.aspx?ID=44
List of 110 libraries found at the Ludwig-Maximillian-Universitat Munchen: http://www.ub.uni-muenchen.de/bibliotheken/
Model Licences: http://www.licensingmodels.org/
The Scholarly Kitchen (from the Society for Scholarly Publishing) provides a very useful and regular commentary on the latest trends in scholarly publishing: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/
Upshall, M. (2009) Content Licensing: Buying and Selling Digital Resources. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.
Market reports
National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Engineering Indicators (2010): http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/
OECD Key Figures on researcher numbers and growth trends by country/region (2009): http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/27/52/47406944.pdf
The UNESCO Science Report on research market size: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001898/189883E.pdf
Ware, M. and Mabe, M. (2009) The STM Report, STM Association report; http://www.stm-assoc.org/news.php?id=255
Long-term preservation archival services
CLOCKSS: http://www.clockss.org
Portico: http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/services/
Bone, D. and Burns, P. (2011) An Overview of Content Archiving Services in Scholarly Publishing (Allen Press): http://allenpress.com/system/files/pdfs/library/archiving-whitepaper.pdf
Useful sites relating to measuring usage and emerging standards
A list of emerging international standards for naming conventions: https://repinf.pbworks.com/w/page/13779410/Authorpercent20identification
Project COUNTER: http://www.projectcounter.org
SUSHI Protocol: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi
JISC Usage Statistics Portal: http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk/
Open access business models
For anyone interested in the variety of Open Access business models, I would refer you Raym Crow’s comprehensive review of various income models: http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/incomemodels_v1.pdf
Directory of Open Access Journals is a comprehensive database of OA journals: http://www.doaj.org/
Open access case studies: OUP have been very open with information relating to their open access publishing activities, e.g. Bird, C. (2010) Continued adventures in open access, Learned Publishing, 23: 107–16 http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20100205
Withey, L. et al. (2011) Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses; A Report of the AAUP Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing. Lynne Withey from the University of California Press and her colleagues produced a very useful report on the economics of publishing primarily for university presses. However, much of the report’s findings can be applied to other types of publishing organisation. http://www.aaupnet.org/images/stories/documents/aaupbusinessmodels2011.pdf
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