Data is essential for making smarter decisions and delivering better marketing and customer experiences. While association executives understand this, many struggle to use their data effectively. Organizations often face multiple challenges including fragmented data across departments, outdated technology, limited analytics, and lack of modern marketing skills. For associations that outsource their journal publishing to commercial publishers, the challenge of data availability can often be added to this list.
Many associations use external publishers (commercial or large university presses) to produce and distribute their journals, news and member magazines, and other publications. Their reasons for entering publishing relationships include gaining access to wider distribution and visibility and creating sustainable revenue streams that are crucial to the association. But in entering these relationships, they often give up control of, and even access to, critical data that is generated by their publications – from subscription and audience information to usage patterns and marketing analytics – without fully understanding the consequences.
For associations, data from their publications – particularly journals – represents one of their most valuable strategic assets. Journal content is uniquely valuable because it combines structured data, high discoverability, and significant daily traffic. No other data source provides such rich, actionable insights into an association’s community.
In our work with association clients, we see first-hand the impact of fragmented and limited access to data generated by association activities. As a result, we are increasingly advising associations to take a stronger stance on data sovereignty – meaning, securing unrestricted rights to access and use association data, even when working with external partners such as commercial publishers. Data sovereignty can be about ownership rights, but in many cases, it is sufficient for associations to have the right and ability to access, analyze, and use these data to benefit the association at the enterprise level.
Establishing data sovereignty is not just a matter of principle – it has profound practical and commercial implications. The publishing landscape is evolving rapidly, and associations find themselves realizing how critical access to data is to enable revenue diversification strategies, to more effectively serve their communities, to attract and recruit authors and reviewers to support their journals, and to operate more efficiently. This is a need that will only accelerate as marketing and other technologies create clear and compelling use cases for audience data.
Data Sovereignty Challenges
Many societies have partnered with commercial and large nonprofit publishers (Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and others) for the production, hosting, selling, and marketing of their journals and other publications. There are many good reasons for such partnerships, including risk mitigation, stabilization of revenue streams, broader distribution, and operational efficiency. Increasingly, societies are looking to publishers for the scale and expertise they need to negotiate and execute transformative agreements (although TAs bring a new set of challenges for societies).
While societies benefit from working with commercial publishers, these relationships do come with tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs are becoming increasingly complicated. As C&E’s Joe Esposito calls out in an article in The Scholarly Kitchen, there is a “fundamental asymmetry” in these relationships:
“There is a fundamental asymmetry in these arrangements: a society publisher signs a contract with an Elsevier or a Wiley and receives a check, but the huge aggregator gets access to the data surrounding the society’s content in addition to what it can capture from the sale of license of that content. Thus, publishers of all stripes need not only stronger, enforceable copyright protection; they also need a means to exploit their data through clever marketing models, and perhaps for the most ambitious, models that include building their own AI services. What would a bot built on ScienceDirect look like? What could it do? How could Elsevier’s shareholders profit from it?”
One of the most profound points of asymmetry is access to data. Publishers control some of a societies most valuable data streams because they manage the key systems and relationships: the journal platforms where readers engage, the sales relationships, and the author workflow systems. Publishers usually share aggregate trend data with society partners – usage statistics, bibliometric trends, and revenue reporting. Societies typically have access to some aspects of individual author data (related to specific submissions to the journal) via their manuscript submission/peer review system. However, access to granular, individualized data across the publishing enterprise remains limited. Common gaps include:
- Journal- and institution-level subscription data about exact parameters of a “big deal” or “transformative agreements” – including, in the case of consortia deals, which institutions can access their content
- Audience data – who is viewing content and what content are they viewing?
- Customer data – who has subscribed to emails and registered for an account on the publisher platform?
- Marketing performance, SEO, and web page analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) – How are people discovering my content, how are they engaging onsite, and how do my marketing campaigns impact usage trends?
Data sovereignty is not just about receiving reports from your publisher. While reports are valuable, what societies truly need is direct access to raw data on a regular basis. This allows a society to integrate the data with their own systems, perform custom analyses, and leverage it for business intelligence (BI) and marketing purposes.
Data Sovereignty as Key to Audience Intelligence & Business Intelligence
Associations’ competitive advantage lies in their deep community connections and the consonance of their offerings. Data about your audience (“audience intelligence”) is essential for building a better customer experience and tailoring services to your community needs. Understanding an association’s broader audience requires weaving together two types of data: declared data (openly shared by individual community members, often called “zero-party data”) and inferred data (drawn from behaviors, transactions, and relationships, typically called “first-party data”). By bringing together both kinds of audience data and unifying it across their digital ecosystem, associations can craft experiences that truly resonate with their communities.
Journal content – being highly discoverable, widely read, and topically specific – provides some of the richest audience insights a society possesses. For savvy associations, this content acts as the “tip of the spear,” offering deep audience intelligence about their community’s topical interests. This insight is foundational for targeted marketing and recommendations and provides rich intelligence that informs content and product development strategies. Operating without access to this vital data is akin to owning a new car but being denied the keys to start its engine.
Benefits of Data Sovereignty
Societies can use this audience data to achieve key business objectives:
Make Better Strategic Decisions
Analyzing journal audience data alongside association-wide customer insights reveals what the community values and highlights new opportunities across programs and services.
- Identify opportunities through content analysis – Understanding who engages with specific content helps uncover meaningful opportunities. By cross-referencing content usage trends across segments like career stage, geography, and membership status, associations can tailor their product and content strategies. For example, insights may show that clinicians prefer multimedia summaries, younger researchers seek career development content, or there is a growing demand for an event in China.
- Gain deeper insights through role-based analysis – Mapping the multiple professional roles of association members unlocks valuable intelligence. Tracking activities – such as authorship, peer review participation, or abstract submissions – provides data to shape strategic decisions and drive targeted marketing and editorial efforts.
Improve Association Marketing Performance
Employing journal audience data alongside association-wide customer insights results in more effective marketing. This approach personalizes experiences, boosting engagement with content, programs, and services.
- Targeted campaigns – Use audience data to craft personalized marketing campaigns based on engagement patterns and behaviors. For example, identify highly engaged early-career journal readers and invite them to exclusive mentorship or training programs to cultivate future leaders.
- Identify high-intent cohorts – Track content engagement to identify segments showing interest in membership. For instance, members frequently interacting with membership-related content or offers on the journal platform may be prime candidates for targeted membership campaigns.
- Align promotions with audience interests –Audience intelligence data can be used to align promotions with readers’ topical interests. For example, if an author frequently submits and reads content on a niche topic, invite them to submit abstracts for events seeking sessions on that subject.
- Drive engagement – Deliver recommended content and personalized messages that present offerings by topic or theme, transcending program boundaries to foster deeper engagement. For example, recommend blog articles based on journal reading patterns to create cross-content connections, or surface relevant association content from across programs under a “Recommended for You” section.
Enhance Journals Marketing
Although commercial publishers offer their society clients marketing support, they provide limited author marketing assistance and almost no support for broader association programs and goals. This is not to undervalue the work of commercial publishers. Commercial publishers excel at institutional marketing (B2B) and they have platform features and discoverability programs that drive readership. When it comes to growing author submissions, publishers use their extensive cross-journal and external data to enable targeted outreach and data-driven analysis. Most publishers can run automated, personalized campaigns on their platforms, though sophistication levels vary.
Commercial publishers make strategic choices about how they allocate their marketing resources. They must balance promoting any single society’s journals against both their full portfolio of partner titles and their own proprietary journals (and the financial incentives naturally favor promoting their own, proprietary journals). As a result, there tend to be three main challenges for associations:
- There are a limited number of journal-specific campaigns allocated for society-owned journals.
- Broad campaigns are often not journal-specific or sufficiently refined. For instance, publishers might have automated marketing supporting transformative agreements, but these campaigns often lack journal-specific branding and are not adequately segmented, tested, or delivered cross-channel to maximize impact.
- A commercial publisher’s journal marketing remains isolated from a society partner’s broader activities, communications, and community engagement. This separation prevents creating fully integrated campaigns that could leverage both journal insights and the society’s rich community data and channels.
The hard truth is that to either improve author experience or increase submission volume, associations must complement commercial publishers’ marketing approaches with their own efforts. Associations can only be more effective marketers when they have access to the necessary audience data from their journal portfolio.
Increase Industry Revenue
When journal audience insights connect with broader society data, organizations unlock new high-value opportunities across advertising, sponsorships, and industry partnerships. This integration provides a comprehensive view of audience interests and behaviors, enabling more targeted offerings and increasing non-dues revenue.
Support New Products and Emerging Business Models
In the longer term, given the inherently rich nature of scholarly and professional content, access to audience data is crucial for associations. Audience data can inform myriad product development initiatives. It is hard to imagine developing a digital product today without a deep understanding of one’s audience and how they interact with your existing offerings.
Data itself can be a product too or the route to create a new product. Imagine personalized discovery tools with smart alerts, AI research assistants that identify foundational studies in your field, or big data analysis across millions of articles that uncovers promising therapeutic combinations and novel approaches to global challenges. This same data can power contextual content summaries tailored for different audiences – from researchers to clinicians, residents, and the general public.
The emergence of AI and large language models (LLMs) brings new urgency to the matter of audience and content data, though the full implications are still emerging. Contractual agreements over rights to access, use, and control data generated by association content and users on publisher platforms will require careful negotiation with additional attention to user privacy protections.
Overcoming the Blockers
In our experience, commercial publishers often say they agree with the principle of sharing data with their society partners. However, when societies request data access, they often face administrative walls. These walls are reinforced by teams like Legal, Information Security and Privacy, Marketing, Technology, and Product, and they all need to align before data can be shared. And that alignment may take a very (very, very, very …) long time. Or one team may simply say “it’s against our policy” and block progress.
When societies request their data, publishers typically raise these objections:
- We don’t have a mechanism to share behavioral data or customer data.
- Privacy laws prevent us from sharing user or customer data.
- We can’t share institutional subscription details because it is business proprietary information.
These barriers are not insurmountable. Solutions exist that comply with privacy laws, although they require publishers and associations to invest time and resources. In fact, we are aware of at least two publishers that are already piloting expanded data sharing with their society partners.
In private, publishers sometimes dismiss the urgency of data sharing, suggesting that associations are not ready or would not know how to use the data effectively anyway. Our experience shows the contrary – many associations are actively developing strategies to use data as a strategic asset. Some associations may not be ready today, but they will be in the near future, and wish to take steps now (e.g., in publishing contracts) to secure data rights.
What Associations Should Do
Take steps to secure data rights. Associations should persist in advocating for their data rights, elevating this as a high-priority issue. If this does not seem important now, we promise it will be! The experience of trade publishers offers a cautionary tale: tempted by the promise of increased distribution, they gave up control of their audience data to Amazon. Now, every trade publisher wishes they could turn back time and make a different choice.
Consider data rights in selection of a publisher. In recent RFPs, we’ve seen associations evaluating publishers on a broader set of criteria. The rise of open access and the need to increase submissions and published output has underscored the importance of modern marketing, and associations are evaluating publishers on their marketing technologies and capabilities. Data sovereignty should be another crucial factor in the decision about which publisher to partner with. Associations have the most leverage to secure their data rights during an RFP process (when publishers are encouraged to align with society interests to be competitive) and execution of a next publishing contract. Even if it is something you are not ready for today, securing data rights in your contract is critical as you may want to exercise them at some point during the term (typically 5–10 years) of your publishing services agreement. This is an evolving area, and we encourage securing appropriate expertise to support your negotiations.
Build a data strategy. Start by mapping your business needs and use cases for audience data. Work with experts to assess your current skills and technology against these needs. Then develop a roadmap to advance your data capabilities. This will likely involve changes to your marketing technology and data infrastructure, as well as the skills and organizational design needed to both analyze data and make use of it.
What Commercial Publishers Should Do
We do not want to minimize the fact that there is significant work to be done in achieving true data sovereignty for associations. But we strongly argue that data sovereignty should be a high priority for all associations.
Moreover, we believe publishers who take the lead in offering easy and society-friendly solutions for data sharing may find themselves with a significant competitive advantage. As societies become more aware of the importance of data sovereignty, they’re likely to favor publishers who facilitate this in their partnership agreements.
This is not just about overcoming obstacles in sharing data, but about creating a new paradigm in publisher-society relationships – one that recognizes the mutual benefits of data sharing and collaborative insights. By working together to achieve data sovereignty, both publishers and associations can better serve their communities, drive innovation, and ensure their continued relevance in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
