Academic and Professional Publishing

Robert Campbell, Ed Pentz, Ian Borthwick

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843346692
• eBook ISBN: 9781780633091
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Academic and professional publishing represents a diverse communications industry rooted in the scholarly ecosystem, peer review, and added value products and services. Publishers in this field play a critical and trusted role, registering, certifying, disseminating and preserving knowledge across scientific, technical and medical (STM), humanities and social science disciplines. Academic and Professional Publishing draws together expert publishing professionals, to provide comprehensive insight into the key developments in the industry and the innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches being applied to meet novel challenges.This book consists of 20 chapters covering what publishers do, how they work to add value and what the future may bring. Topics include: peer-review; the scholarly ecosystem; the digital revolution; publishing and communication strategies; business models and finances; editorial and production workflows; electronic publishing standards; citation and bibliometrics; user experience; sales, licensing and marketing; the evolving role of libraries; ethics and integrity; legal and copyright aspects; relationship management; the future of journal publishing; the impact of external forces; career development; and trust in academic and professional publishing.This book presents a comprehensive review of the integrated approach publishers take to support and improve communications within academic and professional publishing. - Brings together expert publishing professionals to provide an authoritative insight into industry developments - Details the challenges publishers face and the leading-edge processes and procedures used to meet them - Discusses the range of new communication channels and business models that suit the wide variety of subject areas publishers work in

1

Introduction: overview of academic and professional publishing

Robert Campbell

Abstract:

This introductory chapter presents the reader with an overview of the historical trends, current status and market developments in academic and professional publishing, and a dark cloud gathering over the industry. The chapter notes how these widespread changes are addressed throughout the book, with chapters providing insight into the integrated, innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches publishers are applying to adapt to the challenges facing the industry and take publishing forward. It also outlines what publishers do, how publishers add value and what the future may look like for the industry.

Key words

Industry trends

peer review

added value

journals

books

data

market development

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to provide publishing professionals and interested stakeholders with a timely and comprehensive update on the widespread changes in academic and professional publishing and the integrated, innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches being applied to adapt to the challenges presented. While we attempt to cover books, journals and new models for scholarly communication in this work, the emphasis is on journals given their dominant position in the academic and professional publishing market. In several of the chapters, the authors look at recent developments to shape their views on how publishing may evolve. We all agree that we are in a period of rapid change and this has been the stimulus for our writing the book. We also cover what publishers do, how publishers add value and what the future may look like for the industry. This introductory chapter presents the reader with an overview of the historical and current trends and developments, a dark cloud gathering over the industry, and an outlook on the industry’s exciting future.

Trends in journal publishing

Journal publishing is a success story, although it has its critics. The nature of this criticism has been fairly constant and is typified by the quotation below:

‘Librarians are suffering because of the increasing volume of publications and rapidly rising prices. Of special concern is the much larger number of periodicals that are available and that members of the faculty consider essential to the successful conduct of their work. Many instances were found in which science departments were obliged to use all of their allotment for library purposes to purchase their periodical literature which was reported as necessary for the work of the department.’

This might have been published last week, but in fact it appeared in a report prepared for the Association of American Universities in 1927. One of the concerned institutions was Cornell University, where a list of 633 periodical subscriptions increased in price by 182 per cent between 1910 and 1925 (Okerson, 1986).

Such criticism – mainly around pricing, too much published, role and control – has led in the last decade to a much greater understanding of the field, partly gained through research into publishing, which is reflected throughout this book. As a core example, Michael Mabe (in Chapter 17) takes us back to the mid-17th century correspondence of Henry Oldenburg to outline the basic functions of a research journal: registration, certification, dissemination and archiving. This has proven to be a robust model with the number of titles growing steadily in an almost straight-line graph from the launch of The Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society in 1665 to a total of around 23 000 journals (Mabe, 2003) and at least 27 000 in 2011 with the proliferation of pay-to-publish (Gold Road) Open Access titles. Although these basic functions remain the same, means such as pricing and technology continue to evolve as is discussed in several chapters in this book.

Mabe also identified the answer to the ‘increasing volume of publishing’ concerns, as he showed that journal growth simply reflects the growth in the research community. This trend also addresses another criticism, that peer review is unsustainable as reviewers can no longer be found to review the ever increasing number of articles submitted. The answer is that the growth in the research community and thus the availability of reviewers increases in line with the growth in articles produced (Vines et al., 2010). There is also evidence that the number of articles produced per researcher per annum is dropping slightly, e.g. from 0.82 in 1984 to 0.78 in 1998, although the average number of authors per article is increasing, e.g. from 2.5 in 1980 to 3.8 in 2002 (Moed, 2005).

The four phases of the ‘modern journal’

Journals were essentially national entities until the Second World War, published by societies, university presses or specialist academic publishing houses (particularly in Germany). The international research journal as a successful business model stems from the launch of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta in 1946. It lost money for several years but was seen by Robert Maxwell and others as the future. The investment in tertiary education and research ensured a well-funded market in the 1950s and 1960s. Mari Pijnenborg at Elsevier saw this as the ‘discovery’ phase in the four phases of development of the ‘modern journal’ (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The four phases of the ‘modern journal’, based on an idea from Mari Pijnenborg. From Campbell and Wates (2009)

In the second phase, ‘exploitation’, commercial as well as not-for-profit publishers invested in launching new titles and growing them. Commercial publishers gained market share as they were able to publish more articles and charge accordingly as they were not constrained by needing to keep costs down for members. These subscription-based journals probably reached their peak in hard copy circulation around 1986, when the industry saw more restricted library budgets, cutbacks in holdings and talk of a ‘serials crisis’. Publishers had to manage their journals more carefully in the third phase (‘management’), seeking efficiencies through new technology (e.g. typesetting) and the economies of scale achieved through mergers and acquisitions.

By the early 1990s the loss in circulation was forcing prices up, leading to further cancellations and thereby reducing access to journal content. A symptom of this problem was the rise in document delivery activity. The British Library’s document supply service was delivering over 3 million articles per annum. Publishers sought to collect compensatory copyright income from photocopying either directly or through Reproduction Rights Organization (RROs) which grew with this increasing photocopying.

The impact of these difficult times was a driver in the development of the Open Access (OA) movement, although the situation has improved hugely since then. Just in time the Internet and related technology enabled publishers to develop new pricing models based on licences giving online access to much more content for little extra cost, epitomised by the so-called ‘Big Deal’ (see Chapter 12 by O’Rourke). The development of this transformative pricing model was actually state-funded. The original pilot was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council in the UK in 1996, with the aim of maintaining access to high-quality peer-reviewed journals in the face of rising print-on-paper costs and cancellations, and to reduce the unit cost of information.

We are now deep in the fourth phase, ‘re-invention’, to which most of this book is devoted. Unlike the newspaper and music industries, journal publishing has survived the migration to the digital age stronger and more successful. Part of the explanation for this may be that newspapers and music sell largely to individuals while journals sell largely to institutions.

The role of institutional libraries is to provide access to the appropriate information for researchers and students. The peer-reviewed journal is an essential element and the library community has the responsibility for maintaining this. Librarians may criticise publishers at times, yet they have worked with publishers to see the journal through an extraor...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of figures and tables
• About the authors
• Chapter 1: Introduction: overview of academic and professional publishing
• Chapter 2: Peer review in a rapidly evolving publishing landscape
• Chapter 3: The scholarly ecosystem
• Chapter 4: The digital revolution
• Chapter 5: Publishing and communication strategies
• Chapter 6: Development of journal publishing business models and finances
• Chapter 7: Development of book publishing business models and finances
• Chapter 8: Editorial and production workflows
• Chapter 9: Electronic publishing standards
• Chapter 10: Citation, bibliometrics and quality: assessing impact and usage
• Chapter 11: Relating content to the user
• Chapter 12: Sales, licensing and marketing
• Chapter 13: The evolving role of libraries in the scholarly ecosystem
• Chapter 14: Publishing ethics and integrity
• Chapter 15: Legal aspects and copyright
• Chapter 16: Relationship management
• Chapter 17: Does journal publishing have a future?
• Chapter 18: External forces and their impacts on academic and professional publishing
• Chapter 19: Career development in academic and professional publishing
• Chapter 20: Epilogue: trust in academic and professional publishing
• Index