Perspectives

The recent announcement that Penguin Random House is pursuing an acquisition of Simon & Schuster points to an emerging paradigm, the publishing company that serves as a nexus for much of an industry’s activity. There are lessons here for STM publishing, too, as one can imagine Elsevier (or even ResearchGate) moving in this direction. A 360° competitor not only looks to its legacy customer base but also develops a strategy that radiates in all directions, becoming the partner of friends and rivals alike. Scale and imagination are prerequisites for this strategy, but the strategy also demands a willingness to unbundle the primary publishing platform and make it available to all comers.

A major element of the scholarly and professional publishing ecosystem is the publishing services agreement, or PSA. In a PSA a professional association or learned society signs an agreement with a larger publisher for journal publishing services. What many societies negotiating a PSA fail to see, however, is that the large publisher has access to a great deal more information about the publishing business than the society does. This essential asymmetry of information provides an enormous advantage to the large publisher in negotiations.

This post was co-authored by Joe Esposito and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R.

Every day, choices are made, and positions advocated, about the best organizational forms for providing the various services needed for the academic enterprise. This is an important, and underexamined, issue for academia. As well-resourced as some universities are, they are not infinite in size, and, as a result, they have to prioritize their investments. When purchasing or developing scholarly communications services, library systems, and research workflow tools, individual universities seek cross-institutional scale, which can be achieved in a variety of ways, including open source software, institutional partnerships, consortia, and outsourcing to third-party organizations, both not-for-profit (NFP) and commercial in structure.

Heads of organizations--CEOs and Executive Directors--need to have a small group of trusted advisors to help in formulating strategy, especially when, for whatever reason, the questions at issue cannot easily be shared with the rest of the management and may initially be beyond the Board’s expertise. Building a brain trust must be done carefully; it must be viewed as a supplement to the management and Board and not a replacement.

Academics are often treated contemptuously by their peers for attempting to write for a popular audience, but the case for popularization is strong, as it both educates the public and helps to gain support for the academic enterprise. Economist Alan Krueger’s Rockonomics is an exceptionally interesting take on the “winner-takes-all” nature of some industries, including music.

The launch of a new journal called “University Journals” by a European consortium was the occasion for a piece on what it takes for a new service to become successful. The challenges are great, as even well-resourced start-ups, with prestigious backers (as is the case for “University Journals”), have to operate in an environment with a great deal of competition. This post lays out what has to be done to be successful.

When Stanford University proposed cutting the subsidiary it provides for its university press, a furor erupted, in part because Stanford is an exceptionally well-endowed institution and the subsidy required seemed a pittance. But in the context of overall university finances and priorities, rarely are presses moved to the top of the pile. For a press to be successful, it has to develop a strategy, including a financial strategy, that does not require it to take money from the university’s operating fund.

Publishing can be a strategic or nonstrategic asset for a society, depending on the society itself and the nature of the program. Many societies begin as publishers, but then evolve into larger entities, for which the publishing division becomes merely a source of money to finance other operations. When societies contemplate whether to continue to invest in their publishing programs or to divest these assets, the question of how central to the society’s overarching goals and mission become paramount. In adverse economic times, many societies are reconsidering just how strategic their publishing programs are.

Working with Ithaka S+R we set out to answer two questions: What proportion of academic library sales of books does Amazon control, and have university press sales to libraries been declining? To these questions we added several more, including investigations into pricing and the subject categories that the acquisitions fell in. I am pleased to report that the final report for that project is now available on the Ithaka S+R Web site. I recommend it to everyone interested in the academic book market. One important takeaway from this study is that publishers and libraries alike seek to analyze their book programs and collections, but are stymied because the data is mostly controlled by intermediaries, who are disinclined to share that data.

Increasingly publishers are being asked to do more with less. New reporting requirements require higher administrative costs, and calls for increased quality controls necessitate expanded editorial oversight. On the other hand, there is significant downward pressure on revenue coming from customers (e.g., libraries) and funding agencies. The net result of this is that many of the quality controls people are demanding will go by the wayside.