Publishing Services Agreements Collection

Associations that publish their journals via a publishing services agreement with a larger publisher must decide whether they should issue a competitive request for proposals or simply renegotiate a renewal with their incumbent publisher. What are the key considerations in making this important decision?

Associations face a critical challenge when outsourcing publishing to commercial publishers – the loss of control over valuable data. While publishers provide aggregate statistics, they restrict access to detailed data about subscriptions, audience behavior, and marketing performance. This article makes the case for data sovereignty – associations securing unrestricted rights to access and use their data, even when working with external partners such as commercial publishers. Establishing data sovereignty is not just a matter of principle – it has profound practical and commercial implications. Access to journal data is especially valuable – its high discoverability, its structured nature, and the significant daily traffic – make it one of the most valuable assets an association has.

Transformative Agreements (TAs) are increasingly popular with publishers and institutions. However, they create significant challenges for the society partners of publishers. It is incumbent on societies to engage in frank discussions with their publisher about the impact of the publisher’s open access strategy and TAs on the society’s journals. It is critical to model, as more of the journal becomes open access via TAs, how the society journal’s different revenue streams will be impacted.

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).

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?

Societies have two fundamental choices when it comes to publishing their journals: they can remain independent, managing all facets of the publication business, or they can work with a larger commercial or not‐for‐profit publisher. If a society chooses to work with a larger publisher, it will invariably do so via a publishing services agreement. This article discusses the challenges and complexities facing independent society publishers and the reasons why some societies choose to enter into publisher services agreements, whereas others choose to remain independent.