End of an Era

End of an Era

1

Just as it began the celebration of its 25th year in operation, HighWire Press announced that it has been sold to MPS for $7.1 million USD, a stunningly low sale price for a company that once was the most prominent start-up in scholarly communications and at its peak brought in somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million in annual revenues. The loss of value is extraordinary for such a stable industry and well-established brand. It is possible that, at its peak, the company could have fetched $125 million or more. 
 
There is a symmetry to the timing. The first publication HighWire hosted was the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC). Earlier this year, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) announced that the society would cease independent publication of JBC and would be moving the journal, along with other ASBMB titles, to Elsevier in order to better manage a shift to open access. This was precisely the kind of transaction that HighWire was established to prevent. Back in the mid-1990s, HighWire’s founders at Stanford University (HighWire began as a division of the Stanford University Libraries before being spun out in 2014 and selling a controlling interest to venture capital/private equity firm Accel-KKR) were concerned that independent society journals would not be able to navigate the shift to online distribution and would wind up cutting deals with commercial publishers, thereby accelerating market consolidation. In this regard, HighWire was successful. Independent societies (as well as larger players like Oxford University Press and SAGE) flocked to HighWire. The platform hosted many of the most prominent independent brands in the industry: The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Science, The BMJ, PNAS, and a great many others. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, HighWire was widely regarded as the most innovative technology provider in the industry, and their invitation-only client meetings were the hottest ticket on the conference circuit. 
 
By the late-00s, however, the rest of the industry caught up; competition in the form of Atypon (and later Silverchair) had established itself, and a series of customer departures began. A case study could be written on the management missteps that brought HighWire from its lofty perch to its present valuation, but structural changes in the market also contributed to HighWire’s decline. The rise of the Big Deal (large packages of online content from a single publisher or aggregator) tilted the marketplace further in favor of the larger players and started to squeeze out the independents. The basis of this competitive advantage was not platform technology but sheer mass (and the share of institutional budgets allocated to that mass). During this same period, the vanguard of communication technology also shifted from academia and enterprise computing to the consumer web and personal devices. When HighWire was established, scholarly publishing, with its SGML workflows and IP authentication models, was years ahead of newspaper publishers, magazines, and just about any other media business you could think of. But the consumer web eventually caught up and the pace of technology development, and the bar for user expectations, was no longer set at Stanford but down the road at Google and Facebook and Apple (and up the coast at Amazon). 
 
And then came open access. While advocates promoted OA as a great leveling force that would challenge the dominance of the commercial houses and lead to a more diverse marketplace, in reality the opposite has happened. It turns out that OA benefits from large-scale operations — broad and deep editorial portfolios and low cost structures — conditions hard to muster except at the largest publishers. It also turns out that OA can be layered on to Big Deals, now dubbed “transformative agreements,” adding more mass to the commercial houses (see also Item 7 below). The rise of transformative agreements has proven to be the last straw for a growing number of independent publications. HighWire was more exposed to these trends than competitors like Silverchair and Atypon (now owned by Wiley), which each host large publishers (McGraw-Hill, Wolters Kluwer, and OUP in the case of Silverchair; Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE in the case of Atypon) on their platforms.  
 
HighWire’s sale marks the end of the era when the big challenge in scholarly and professional publishing was “going digital.” The shift from print to digital was not simple (and it neither started with HighWire nor is it yet completed) as it required not just digital distribution (where HighWire was an early mover) but digital-first workflows, new production technologies, and new business models supported by new supply chains. HighWire is the company that perhaps most iconically represented this era. That said, this is not an obituary; HighWire has merely changed hands, not folded up shop. Its new owner, MPS, also has a long track record in both software and scholarly publishing and the low cost of acquisition presumably means that MPS can afford to invest in reinvigorating the firm. But MPS will have its work cut out for itself. The structural headwinds HighWire has been facing show no signs of abatement and its competitors are not standing still. 

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Source: HighWire Press, Equity Bulls, Elsevier

Professional and Academic Publishing

2

cOAlition S, whose goal is to revolutionize scholarly publishing and the rules of capitalization, has issued a “letter to publishers” with some new rules and a nifty form to fill out to ensure that papers underwritten by cOAlition S funders are made open access. Some will find the letter to be confusing, but Alan Partridge offered a prescient explanation way back in 1994. Rick Anderson goes further than this: in a scathing critique he calls Plan S’s “Rights Retention Strategy” deliberately misleading — it’s really a “rights confiscation strategy” — and even “Orwellian.” The cOAlition S letter provides several paths to compliant OA, with the stipulation that all papers, as part of the rights retention strategy, must bear either a CC-BY Creative Commons license or its sibling, CC-BY ND — which means, in effect, that the publishers do not own any aspect of the publication that they have invested in and authors must effectively put their work in the public domain and cede nearly all control over what others might do with it. 

The purpose of the form that accompanies the letter is to provide data for a “Journal Checker Tool,” which will enable authors and funders to look up journals to see if they are compliant with cOAlition S’s diktat. Publishers can choose from one of five options, ranging from a declaration that they are already fully compliant to a statement of non-participation (option #5), which says: “We will not [emphasis theirs] change our publishing agreement(s) to accommodate Plans [sic] S requirements, but we acknowledge that we have been given notice of the obligations that apply to cOAlition S organisations´ grantees. Please ensure that the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool (JCT) identifies our journal(s) as one(s) not allowing compliance with the Plan S Open Access requirements….” We wonder if cOAlition S truly expects anyone to check that box.

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Source: cOAlition S, YouTube, The Scholarly Kitchen

3

The European Research Council is the latest funder to announce they are pulling out of Plan S: “During the past six months, the ERC Scientific Council has intensified its internal debate and reached a unanimous decision to follow a path towards Open Access implementation that is independent of cOAlition S activities. Therefore it has decided to withdraw as a supporter of cOAlition S.” The ERC makes it abundantly clear that they still support OA, but they are concerned that the Plan S stipulations work against the interests of early-career researchers. There are also some matters of equity: “Other aspects include the need to preserve equity among research communities and among European countries, with particular emphasis on countries with more limited national financial support for research.” 
 
When Plan S was first announced, the research it funded encompassed about 3.5% of global research output according to a 2018 analysis by Delta Think. Since that time, Plan S has seen a net loss of research market share as funders from Sweden and Italy, and now the ERC, have departed the coalition. The UK has also left the EU and the alignment of UK research policy with that of cOAlition S remains under scrutiny. At the same time, national funders in China, India, the US, and other major research centers have indicated they will neither be joining the coalition nor aligning policies with it. Writing on Twitter, Lisa Hinchliffe asks, “Is @cOAlitionS_OA starting to crumble?”

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Source: European Research Council, Delta Think’s News & Views, Research Information, @lisalibrarian via Twitter

4

While a number of scholarly publishers have indicated that they will not be raising journal prices during the pandemic, JSTOR has done them one better, introducing a three-part plan to help the community through these difficult times. The first part is to offer subscribers a credit in the range of 3%–5% for subscriptions to JSTOR and ArtSTOR. A second part is to forego any price increases for the next three years. Most unusual is the commitment not to penalize JSTOR’s participating publishers: JSTOR will guarantee its publishers the same royalty income they received in 2019. The cost of the program is $4 million. Kevin Guthrie, the president of Ithaka (JSTOR’s parent) notes that “Covering the costs of these initiatives will require us to run an operating deficit this year, but we are also taking steps to reduce expenses to help balance the budget and preserve resources needed to maintain the JSTOR archive for future generations. We have cut spending throughout the organization, have imposed limits on hiring, and are actively implementing processes and procedures to decrease inefficiencies.”

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Source: JSTOR

5

Some publications are important for what they say, some are important because of who says them. Writing in a (rare) signed article for The Economist, Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, whose lab is responsible for so much of the innovation surrounding CRISPR, argues that “science and its practice seem to be undergoing rapid and perhaps permanent changes. Three ways that the pandemic is shaking up the scientific status quo include public respect for science, how discoveries are communicated and the norms of collaboration. After COVID-19, science will never be the same.” Watching the news day by day, with people wandering about without masks and stepping into crowded spaces, we wonder if Doudna may be a bit optimistic about the public’s respect for science. But putting that aside, we are more struck with her confidence in the publishing environment during the medical crisis. COVID-19, she argues, has seen the rise of the preprint; and, while she notes that preprints are not formally peer-reviewed, “preprints are quickly dissected on social media, enabling scientists to quickly replicate and build on findings. The rapid and open access to research will improve the communication of science and the involvement of non-scientists in the enterprise.” Her final point is that the pandemic is fostering more collaborative work. We don’t have a means to judge the point about an increase in meaningful collaboration, but we suspect that Doudna’s Twitter feed must be more fact-filled and reliable than ours. (We also shudder to think of the involvement of non-scientists in the “enterprise,” but perhaps she merely has thoughtful, reflective, and unbiased elected officials in mind!) Into the fray leap Michael Eisen and Robert Tibshirani. Writing behind a paywall in a prestigious newspaper Eisen and Tibshirani call for “American scientists and journalists to join forces to create a rapid-review service for preprints of broad public interest.” Developing a kind of “reviewer on call” bureau for journalists is a good idea, though we note that in the current pandemic, it would add to the review burden of researchers during a time when that review burden is already crushing. There are only so many experts on a given topic and if they are being asked to review papers for journals, and review preprints for journalists, and keep their own research going, and write their own papers, and bake their own sourdough bread while homeschooling their children … at a certain point one just runs out of hours in the day.

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Source: The Economist, The New York Times

6

The financial underpinnings for many professional societies rest on three pillars: membership, publications, and conferences. The proportion of these elements varies from society to society, and they can change over time, but an event like the pandemic can destabilize this foundation, and conferences are the first and worst to be hit. Conference revenue for societies is down for the obvious reason that it is unsafe to travel, but for many societies some of the costs remain despite the absence of in-person meetings, as many venues had to be booked long in advance. Different societies are dealing with the situation in different ways. For societies that generated a surplus from conferences, the lost revenue is likely to mean cutbacks in other services — for example, special programs for early-career researchers. For those societies for which the annual conference ran at breakeven at best, the loss is measured in the fixed or committed overhead but also in the absence of what will not happen: the serendipitous meetings in the corridor, the networking with senior members in the field, and the focused questions on novel papers. Many societies have moved to virtual conferences, with varying degrees of success. It appears probable that even when (or is that if?) in-person conferences return (our crystal ball is telling us that will not happen until the second half of 2021), the virtual component will still be with us. The intriguing question for the long term is how in-person and virtual conferences will distinguish themselves, and how the different elements will be monetized.

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Source: Nature

7

It is notable when C&E’s Senior Partner and SPARC come to the same conclusion. In this case, both parties are quoted in this Physics Today article questioning the sustainability of “transformative agreements.” The problem is that any model that shifts costs to institutions based on research output will ultimately result in shifting nearly all the costs of scholarly communication to a small number of research-intensive institutions. Take the example provided by Brandon Nordin of the American Chemical Society: “Of the 6,000 institutions subscribing to ACS’s journal packages, between 300 and 500 produce 85% of published papers.” Transformative agreements (also known as “Read and Publish” or “Publish and Read” agreements) are called such as they are meant to shift or transform the basis of payment from subscriptions (read) to article processing charges (publish). Some agreements do this gradually. Others, like Projekt DEAL in Germany, do it all at once. But such deals have only been possible because publishers have not (yet) priced them to offset subscription cancellations from less-research-intensive institutions. To take the example of ACS, if all of its content is OA, ACS will likely be left with 300–500 transformative deals and 5,500–5,700 institutions that simply cancel their subscriptions (as all the content will be open). At that point, those 300–500 institutions are left picking up a tab that is currently split among 6,000 institutions. Even if publishers cut costs, it will still be a very large tab for such a small number of institutions. A recent SPARC report quoted by Physics Today (and covered in last month’s issue of The Brief — see Item 4) notes that “It remains to be seen whether [research-intensive] ‘publish’ institutions will be able and willing to accept the radical reallocation of costs logically implied by transformative agreements.”

The SPARC report goes on to observe that “Every [transformative] deal signed lowers the value of ‘read’ subscriptions at all other institutions.” Joe Esposito refers to this as the “counting the holes in the Swiss cheese” problem. At a certain point publishers will have to dramatically raise the prices of these agreements to offset cancellations. So why are publishers and institutions pursuing such deals? 

Most transformative deals result in a modest revenue increase for the publisher. Perhaps more importantly, they also bring an early-adopter advantage in terms of market share of papers. The first publishers to sign a transformative deal with a given institution or consortia are likely to see a resulting increase in paper submissions at the expense of other publishers. So in the short-to-medium term, publishers like Wiley and Springer Nature that are signing many transformative agreements are betting that they can pick up enough new papers (at the expense of other publishers, and especially Elsevier) that the growth will offset pricing pressures on their subscription business (in other words a “make hay when the sun shines” strategy). At the same time, the publishers are reducing their cost structures and preparing for an eventual flip to OA. The timeline matters a great deal in this case. “Eventual” may mean years or it may mean decades. At the moment, the appetite for transformative deals is largely limited to Europe. If that remains the case, then publishers may be dealing with a pluralistic model for quite some time yet.

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Source: Physics Today, SPARC, The Scholarly Kitchen

8

A new report commissioned by the European University Association and drafted by the Technopolis Group overlooks the “counting the holes in the Swiss cheese” problem (see Item 7 above) and the large tab that will at some point come due for research-intensive institutions and their funders. The report, “Read & Publish Contracts in the Context of a Dynamic Scholarly Publishing System,” explores the potential outcomes of transformative agreements on scholarly communication. The report’s authors view transformative agreements as a transitory state on a road to a fully OA ecosystem. They posit two future states, one in which the current journal system largely continues to exist but is transformed to fully OA, and one in which scholarly communication shifts away from publishers to “OA community platforms.” The report is based on a Delphic survey process, whose respondents indicated that the former state (which the report terms “publisher-owned OA platforms or journals”) is a far more likely outcome, but that the latter is preferable.
 
Neither the authors of the report nor the survey respondents, however, acknowledge that the costs European institutions (universities and funders) currently enjoy via transformative deals are only possible because institutions in the rest of the world continue to pay for subscriptions. Were the ecosystem to shift entirely to OA, the costs for research-intensive regions, such as Germany, France, The Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe, would likely increase. The report implies that, to the contrary, there would be no cost increase in a shift to OA — or that costs would even go down. 
 
The discussion of the “OA community platform” is perhaps the most striking portion of this report. The respondents acknowledge many of the challenges such a scenario would present. Implicit in the discussion of this scenario, however, is the understanding that such a model would have to be imposed, top down, on researchers and scholars. The report notes that “respondents could see researchers opposing this change as they would not be able to publish in desirable journals and get their ‘quality stamp’ which is currently one of the fundaments of progress in the academic career system.” 
 
Leaving aside the notion that the only reason that researchers might wish to retain journals is because of the function they serve in research assessment, the idea that a top-down system, imposed on researchers against their will, would be largely preferable to respondents even if unfeasible (due, in part, to the resistance of said researchers) is remarkable. It is even more extraordinary when framed as allowing “the academic sector to take back control over publishing.” So the academic sector can “take back control over publishing” only by forcing researchers and scholars into a publishing model that they do not want? Who exactly is the “academic sector” serving? 

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Source: European University Association/Technopolis Group

Higher Education

9

No one doubts that higher education in the US is in for a hard time, but, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dean O. Smith argues that there is already a playbook in place for how universities will deal with this crisis. There will be many areas of retrenchment, which will fall into predictable patterns. First to go will be the discretionary spending (e.g., suspending nonessential business travel, imposing a hiring freeze), but in the current crisis, that is not likely to do the trick. The next step is to tap reserves. Smith does a good job of explaining the difference between a reserve and an endowment: an endowment is not a piggy bank that can be broken open in bad times, as each dollar removed today is being taken away from the institution for tomorrow’s needs. After drawing on all the cash it can, a university then seeks new revenue streams (e.g., a paid online service), but such services typically take years to become profitable. Now come the more painful cuts, as operating expenses are pared. This could include reducing or eliminating programs, stopping construction projects, and laying off or furloughing personnel. This is also when there are cuts to library collections budgets. Universities that are still bleeding may then turn to the most unwelcome cuts of all, the elimination of tenured faculty. Thus will a university administration steer through the storm. Not every ship will prove to be seaworthy.

And yet. We don’t see any factual objection to Smith’s overview and predictions, but we wonder if this crisis may be fundamentally different from others that universities have weathered (at great cost) in the past. Fault lines in higher education have been front page news for years, not the least being the explosion of student debt and what to outsiders appears to be a runaway cost structure. There is also the challenge of declining enrollments, with a demographic collapse coming in 2026 (because people had fewer kids during the Great Recession). On top of this is the perception (right or wrong) that higher education may not be delivering the goods, or at least not everybody is receiving them. Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches a seminar in higher education, notes that there is an enormous divide between the top-ranked colleges and the rest. Only 46 (!) colleges in the US have an acceptance rate of under 20%: 

Of the roughly 70 percent of American high school graduates who enroll in college, 40 percent attend community college … nearly 40 percent of undergraduates leave without a degree. Thirty-four million Americans — over a tenth of the nation’s population — have some college credits but dropped out before graduating. They are nearly twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans.

We may find that on the far side of the pandemic, higher education will be a very different thing, with the most prestigious institutions surviving virtually intact, but the others are likely to go through significant restructuring, including shutdowns and mergers. Meanwhile, a generation now well-trained on Zoom may seek less costly alternatives to ivy-covered buildings and Animal House. This may also be an area where unconventional start-ups attempt to take a piece of the market. And it’s not just for undergraduates that change is coming: Joshua Kim puts this starkly for master’s degrees, which for many institutions generate a surplus: “Over the next few years, what will happen is that very quickly, most residential and high-priced master’s degrees will disappear. They will be replaced by fewer schools offering low-cost online degrees. Right now, most schools can carve out a place in that new master’s degree future. But the clock is ticking.”

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Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Review of Books, Inside Higher Ed

10

Well, that was fast. On July 5 the Trump administration banned international students enrolled at institutions that are not planning for site-based classes in the fall. On July 7 MIT and Harvard jointly sued the administration to reverse the decision. Trump reacted on July 10 by threatening to remove universities’ tax-exempt status. By July 13 more than 200 schools had joined in litigation against the immigration policy. That same day the administration backed off its plan; the immigration policy returned to what it had been before the ruckus started. On July 14 The New York Times published an opinion piece by Dr. L. Rafael Reif, the president of MIT, who was born in Venezuela. Dr. Reif argues that drawing on the broad international community is the only way that the US can compete with the much larger population of China: immigration among top students is in the US’s interest. So no harm, no foul, right? Maybe not. This wild adventure of a single week upended the urgent activities at universities to plan for the fall, and it likely incurred fees among lawyers and other outside advisors. Not to mention the personal anxiety of a student, who does not know what to do and may in fact be barred from flying home. And to what benefit, we ask?

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Source: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, CNBC, Vox, The New York Times

11

In the second part of a two-part blog post, Laura Brown, writing for Ithaka S+R, reports on the results of a survey of university press directors on the impact of COVID-19 on university presses. You can find Part One here, and The Brief’s coverage of that here (Item 5). The presses aim to learn from the situation and use those lessons to improve their performance in the months and years ahead. For example, all presses have been forced to develop ad hoc WFH policies, which are likely to continue post-pandemic (whenever that time comes). While no press assumes that the physical office is entirely a thing of the past, it may be used less often, by fewer people, and for highly specific reasons. Working from home has also accelerated the development of fully digital workflows (by presses that had not already developed them), negating one of the reasons to show up in the office. Of concern to many presses is the support they receive (and hope to continue to receive) from their parent universities. With those universities facing dire financial circumstances, it will be hard to make a strong case for university press publishing, even as dozens of institutions shut down or merge and cuts to programs and staffing are made across the university. To adapt to this situation, some presses are setting up publishing service bureaus for other university departments, which has the benefit of making the presses more visible and valuable to the faculty and administration. After reading these two blog posts, we are left with the feeling that the pandemic is not so much the cause of changes in university press publishing as it is a stress that is testing the already existing fault lines in university press publishing, pushing some changes that have already been underway for many years.

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Source: Ithaka S+R

The Book Business

12

How has the pandemic affected the book business? The Association of American Publishers has released its data for May 2020, comparing year-over-year sales. We confess to having reservations about AAP data (Does the AAP have any real insight into Amazon? What about all those books published by non-AAP members? And what about that pesky category of self-published books?), but the figures, as ably summarized by Gary Price on INFOdocket, provide directional guidance. Not surprisingly, sales are down, but not across the board, and in some instances the drop is smaller than we would have anticipated. The big loser (no surprise here) is the K-12 book category (down 32.5%): remote education is not translating into greater book purchasing. Or is it? For higher education, course materials sales are up an astonishing 19.4%, with the implication that online education for older students can mean heightened book purchases. We cannot account for why religious books are up 7% (surely religious bookstores have been closed, just as their trade counterparts). Trade books are down 11%, which suggests that the drop in foot traffic was not offset by the growth in online sales (ebook revenues were up 39.2%). Of note is the sharp growth of audiobooks (up 22%). University press sales were down 10.1%, a figure that likely prefigures a restructuring of the segment in the coming year, as institutional support for the presses is likely to decline (see Item 11). Taken together, these figures suggest to us that the effects of the pandemic are best studied granularly, because, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, God dwells in the details.

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Source: INFOdocket

Technology

13

Jennifer Kemp of Crossref and Mike Taylor of Digital Science make the case for broader adoption of chapter-level DOIs for scholarly monographs. While chapter-level metadata seems essential for edited volumes, where each chapter may have different authors, Kemp and Taylor also make a persuasive case for the value of chapter-level DOIs in improving discovery and usage of single-author monographs. The data point that stopped us in our tracks was the percentage of monographs with no DOI at all (even at the book level): “about two-thirds of books don’t have a persistent and open identifier, ratios that have not significantly changed over the last ten years.” This is a stunning figure and highlights how different book workflows and processes remain from those of journals, where DOI adoption is essentially universal (even predatory and fraudulent journals use them!).

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Source: Digital Science’s News Blog

People

14

Sam Molyneux, co-founder of Meta, and Elizabeth Caley, also from Meta, have started a new venture, Poppy, focused on pathogen sensing.
 
Rick Anderson is named University Librarian at Brigham Young University.
 
Catherine Stihler is selected as the new CEO at Creative Commons.
 
Stephanie Williams is appointed the new Director of Wayne State University Press.
 
In a plot twist, Ed Pentz, after announcing earlier this year that he was resigning, rescinds his resignation and stays on as the Executive Director of Crossref.

Briefly Noted

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The travails of a publishing icon: How J. K. Rowling became Voldemort.
 
EU slashes science spending in new budget. 
 
An exceptionally good instance of data visualization, in this case to illustrate the current status of COVID-19 infections.
 
The 2020 Charleston conference is going virtual. The Frankfurt Book Fair, however, will be a hybrid affair, underwritten, in part, by the German government. 
 
Little Free Libraries are being converted into pantries in response to the pandemic.
 
Stewart Brand’s fifty top book recommendations.
 
The Editor in Chief of JAMA pens an extraordinary letter in support of Dr. Anthony Fauci. 
 
“The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded $1 million in CARES Act economic stabilization grants to ten university presses to help preserve jobs in scholarly publishing and provide for the continued publication of important academic research in the humanities during the pandemic.”
 
How the editors of the New York Times Book Review are dealing with quarantine — without print books at their fingertips. “With a digital database, every book is just a cell block on a spreadsheet.”
 
EDP Sciences pivots to a Subscribe to Open model.  
 
The New York Times prepares to dox “Scott Alexander,” the pseudonymous proprietor of Slate Star Codex, a blog that has become the water cooler conversation for an influential cross-section of Silicon Valley “rationalists.” Alexander responds by taking the whole thing down. 
 
19 publishers representing over 7,000 journals have committed to “set minimum targets for representation of authors, reviewers and editorial decision-makers” to address bias and discrimination. 
 
Publishing during the pandemic: Big box stores have seen book sales jump.
 
An interview with Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, on Mellon’s new direction.

From Our Own Pens

16

In the inaugural post for C&E Perspectives, Michael examines the question of whether the procurement processes used by many societies to select vendors are fit for purpose for the selection of publishers. He concludes that they are not because of the fundamental differences in the structure of publishing services agreements (PSAs) versus most vendor agreements. The most significant difference is that in a PSA, the publisher pays the society. This may sound obvious, but it has profound process implications for societies seeking to evaluate prospective publishers. But what is the alternative to the procurement process?

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Source: C&E Perspectives

17

Writing with Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R, Joe posted about the question of what communications-related services are best provided by the not-for-profit sector, universities in particular but also various NFP organizations working collaboratively, and which services lend themselves to a market-based approach, which is the province of commercial entities and the professional societies that operate as businesses. There is something to be said for both sides. Universities and other NFPs, for example, are very good places to work on mission-based work and on projects where there is no clear market. On the other hand, when services need to be replicated across multiple institutions, the mechanics of the marketplace can provide advantages, including efficiency, of scale.

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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

18

Colleen Scollans wrote a piece for The Scholarly Kitchen on the challenges of marketing in the current environment. 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.

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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

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History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided. — Konrad Adenauerxt