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.

Marketing Technology (MarTech) is transforming how organizations market, optimize customer and user experience, and leverage data and analytics. With over 8,000 tools, the technology landscape is complex and MarTech projects are notoriously hard. Succesful marketing technology adoption requires discipline and a focused strategic approach. This article presents a framework for successful marketing technology adoption.

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.

Guaranteed revenues provide the cornerstone for many publishing services agreements (PSAs), the contracts that professional societies enter into with large publishers related to journal publishing. Societies looking to mitigate their risk and receive predictable revenues must be cognizant of guarantees that do not, in reality, do either of these things (or that do them poorly).

Marketing, as a discipline, has been undergoing profound change, and organizations that understand and embrace modern marketing have a substantial competitive advantage. In this post, Colleen Scollans, head of Clarke & Esposito’s Marketing & Digital Transformation Practice shares her eleven top tips for modern marketing design.

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.

The publishing services RFP is often managed as if it is a “procurement” or “vendor selection” process. This is problematic, as such processes are typically designed to evaluate proposals for fee-for-service vendors. Publishers, however, are not vendors, and they do not typically operate under fee-for-service arrangements. Understanding that the procurement model is not suited to selecting a publisher and negotiating an agreement for publishing services, then what is the alternative? If the procurement model is not suited to selecting a publisher and negotiating an agreement for publishing services, what is the alternative?

Marketing, at the best of times is hard, and in a time of crises, it can feel near impossible. But market we must. Colleagues depend on marketing to develop programs to bring in revenue, which keeps people employed and enables the mission of scholarly and professional publishing to move forward. Customers depend on marketing to stay informed. A handful of simple but powerful strategies can make the difference between striking the right note and a #marketingfail.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in trade book publishing has accelerated over the last two years, a trend that is expected to continue post-pandemic. In a low-growth publishing environment and in an industry that increasingly rewards scale, M&A activity is a useful growth strategy for publishers and a plausible exit strategy for owners of independent publishers.

Conferences are so deeply embedded in the culture and cadence of science and academia that it is hard to imagine what professional life would look like without them. Many organizations are looking to replace conferences with virtual events, but simply streaming the same sessions on the same schedule may prove insufficient. Shifting meetings to virtual formats requires reconceptualizing meetings for the needs of attendees working from home — and rethinking business models, technologies, and processes as well. Societies and associations with annual meetings will need to think the implications for member engagement and member renewals, manuscript recruitment, education, and other ripple effects.