Perspectives

University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. In this transcript of Michael Clarke's talk at the 2016 AAUP Annual Meeting, he discusses what these strategies are and why university presses have struggled to adopt them.

Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity.

Since the late 1990s there have been two drivers of growth in STM and scholarly publishing: site licensing and global expansion. As successful as these activities have been, we appear to be nearing if not a peak, at least a plateau. So the question is, where is the growth going to come from?

Scholarly publishers – especially those in the STM fields – are increasingly enriching their content with an array of metadata with the aim of ensuring that content is distributed broadly, adaptable for multiple purposes, and rendered interoperable with other relevant content. The options available continue to grow, and the value added to content grows as well. Semantic enrichment is an additional class of metadata that further improves the utility, discovery, and interoperability of content.

Given the pace of technological change, new sources of professional information, the increasing competition for attention, shifting demographics, and an uncertain economy, an effective strategy is more important than ever. Not-for-profit organizations tend to focus less on these activities than those in the commercial sector but this "strategy gap" can be overcome.

For all the talk of disruption, scientific publishing in fact has not been disrupted. The reasons for this are rooted in the culture of scientific communication and the functions of scientific journals—functions that have developed over hundreds of years. Those predicting seismic changes to the business of journal publishing because of advances in communication technology have been consistently frustrated. The World Wide Web itself was designed explicitly to disrupt scientific publishing, and yet here we are.