1. Tales From the Front:
How to Survive the Dog-Eat-Dog
World of Scholarly Web
Publishing
Terry Van Schaik
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Terry@LWW.com
May 30, 2003
2. The Early Days
• Members pay little or nothing for
benefit.
• Site is professional and current, 24/7.
• Some archival content is available.
• Site may or may not produce revenue.
• Site is needed for competitive reasons.
• Site should not cost the society.
3. The Early Days
Site does cost money – proved true.
• Hosting
• Software
• Staff training and time
• Archiving
• Customer service and support
• Sales and marketing
4. The Early Days
Site may be a profit center –
proved untrue.
• Banner ads and sponsorship
• Subscription model
• Adjusted subscription prices
• Bundled pricing
• Some archived content is needed.
5. The Early Days
• We had multiple constituencies to
coordinate.
• Copyright protection was/is a concern.
• Equitable financial arrangement was/is
preferable.
• We forged ahead journal-by-journal
starting with proprietary titles, if
possible.
6. The Interim Days
• Commercial publishers were print focused.
• Electronic delivery entered.
• Publishers struggled.
• Autonomous online vendors entered.
– Focused on electronic delivery
– Resources available
– Independent platform for societies
– An alternative for commercial publishers
• Publishers gained experience and skills.
7. The Current Days
• Journal is online and replicates print.
• Electronic delivery can have added
benefits:
– Supplemental data
– E-pages
– Online correspondence
– Publish ahead of print
– Online manuscript submission and peer review
– Content alerts
– Access through search engines
8. The Current Days
• Online communities: The desirability and
necessity of cooperation (Ferguson)
– CTSNet
– VascularWeb
– Publisher may have role (MedCirca,
Cardiosource, NursingCenter)
– Challenges: Loss of brand identity, need
for single entry, “ravenous maw”
9. The Current Days
• Online still costs money.
• Perspective is now global with almost
all journals online.
• Content is “king,” but context is “queen,”
so aggregation (ScienceDirect, Ovid,
MD Consult) and access are goals.
10. The Current Days
• Online communities
– Provide ways to expand use of content
– Advance the common goal: Patient Care
– Have financial implications
• Development and maintenance costs
• Potential loss of revenue
11. What Next?
• Should or when should access to
content be “for free?” What are the
implications for reprint revenue?
• Should new subscribers have access to
back content at no cost?
• How deep should the archive be? How
will conversion expenses be covered?
• How will archives be maintained?
12. What Next?
• Can societies justify the expense of
online given modest activation rates?
• Can foreign language content be
delivered economically?
• What is the optimal pricing model for
online journals?
• Is electronic long/print short (ELPS) a
workable model?
13. What Next?
It’s too late for me to return to book
publishing. Besides I have learned
something about ad sales along the
way. And I realize now that we will all
keep learning about online publishing
and adjusting our vision to incorporate
print and online together – at least for
the time being.
Editor's Notes
I am standing before you today described as a “publishing veteran” in part because I misread the electronic signs back in 1993. At that time, I was a nursing acquisition editor at Mosby. When presented with the chance of a promotion to associate publisher in the journal division, I thought – among other things, “Great. The stability of periodical publishing appeals much more to me than the vicissitudes of nursing and medical book publishing. If I can just figure out ad sales, I’ll be okay.” How wrong could a girl have been? Happily, however, having been fortunate to work within Mosby and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, I can report that “negotiating the internal workings of the scholarly world so that a Web initiative can be developed and implemented effectively” has not been as painful as the words suggest. Taking an historical perspective, today I’d like to look with you at the early, interim and current days of electronic publishing from the view of scholarly societies and commercial publishers.
COSTS Hosting: Big part of infrastructure costs. Includes servers, network connectivity, backup, failover, redundant I’net connections (mirror sites), security Software: Continued development of features required continued software investment programming and license purchases. Major software licenses (e.g., Oracle) have annual maintenance fees = tens of thousands $ Staff time for development, conversion, maintenance, training Staff: training and time to develop, convert, maintain, educate (Staff may be yours or a vendor; but you pay.) Customer service and support: Significant costs. Once online, support calls increase rapidly. High staffing levels needed for round the clock support Sales and marketing
Site may be a profit center We quickly learned that banner advertising and site sponsorship would not cover costs. Some companies (Mosby) used a subscription model initially. Charged for print and online separately and developed complicated pricing structures. Only 8-10% of subscribers paid for online! So then tried selling online as an add-on. Eventually moved to bundled pricing. Some (LWW) adjusted subscription prices to reflect the added benefit. As they moved from high circulation titles to middle and low circulation journals, increasing subscription prices failed to cover costs and risked loss of subscribers. Also competitors were offering online access at little or no additional cost, so to remain competitive and win new business, LWW moved also in that direction. First year at Mosby was free for initial journals. Archiving – Mosby started w/ 2 years with some going back 5 years.
Multiple constituencies : staffing, funding, establishing standards, working with printers or other vendors, educating societies and subscribers Fair financial arrangement Bill asked “How did you set the balance between the company’s bottom line and the society’s bottom line (economic or otherwise.” Answer is simple. We didn’t. For years, we couldn’t even FIND the bottom line! Publisher assumes the risk for developing the online site. Separate P&Ls or cost items maintained. Society earns royalty on the site after the publisher recovers the costs Portion of bundled circulation revenue allocated to both the print and to the online versions on separate P&L statements. Copyright protection (revenue protection) Caution on this front also tempered publisher enthusiasm for online delivery. Forge ahead Sometimes leading society Sometimes being led by society (e.g., online classified advertising) Sometimes misreading signals and paying the price in lost business (e.g., The publisher needed a model that would allow continued competition for new business (e.g., as a publisher, I lost a journal to a competitor in part because I didn’t perceive how important online was to the society’s president and executive director.)
Commercial publisher’s tradition focus Staffing needs changed as different expertise was needed Business model needed adjusting (e.g., library sales for one user at a time and for multiple users at once) Content preparation (needed to change to incorporate prep for print and online delivery) Delivery mode View of product and potential (e.g., no longer seen as an issue but as a collection of information pieces) Publishers struggle Experimentation with pricing, packaging, vendors/in-house Transition gradually underway
Supplemental data Not copyedited and posted at no additional cost to author or editor’s page count Examples Clinical trial data Video Color figures (cf cost at $50 for online and $1,000 for print) Additional figures and tables E-Pages Copyedited and produced as a print page and counted as an editorial page Online correspondence Publish ahead of print Speeds up traditionally expedited articles Of interest particularly to high frequency journals Online m/s and peer review Somewhat related because of drive for immediacy/currency Another era of trial and error
CTSNet Founders of CTSNet foresaw the benefit of online communities and became content aggregator Idea born at 8 hour breakfast in Prague 1996 Vision: develop a community of thoracic surgeons with internationally uniform CME, certification, training Common entry for specialty Common platform Content beyond print journal Links to shared and other content Started w/ three societies; now has waiting list of societies wanting to join Other examples: Vascular surgery, orthopaedic surgery (under discussion) Publishers may have a role Some societies looking to publishers to be the catalyst or start-up partner in an online community Challenges Societies my struggle with giving up brand identity Single entry for all users rather and differing by society Site demands to be fed constantly
Online still costs more Goal for many was to provide as many avenues for access as possible to expand the recognition of society and journal and promulgate the journal’s content and information. Licensing and pay-per-view have taken on greater value as revenue sources. Content king and access is queen: For me getting societies to allow aggregation was often the biggest challenge. They feared loss of subscribers and identity.
Should or when should content be free. A word about reprint revenue. When we looked at the source of reprint revenue for 2002, we found that reprint revenue from articles published in 2001 was 68% of that from articles published in 2002. After that the drop off was much steeper. For example, revenue from articles published in 2000 was 13.6% of that from articles published in 2002.
