Abstract
For this talk, Marks was tasked with summarizing the important trends in scholarly publishing in 45 minutes. The speaker reflected on the rapid changes that have occurred in journal publishing, which followed more than 300 years of relatively slow progress. Marks discussed key technology trends such as data curation, Open Access (OA) mandates, and the changes occurring in the global landscape of scholarly communications and library budgets. Wolters Kluwer Health has been responding to these trends with new publishing experiments including a Platinum OA model in emerging markets. Marks discussed the ways that publishers and libraries need to alter their traditional practices and instill a focus on their customers and communities.
INTRODUCTION
Marks had the difficult task of Summarizing current practices and latest developments in scholarly publishing. The focus of the talk was on markets familiar to Marks in her role at Wolters Kluwer Health. Marks is in the health division of Wolters Kluwer, the full title of which is Health Learning, Research & Practice. Their goal is to provide the resources needed by students, residents, and practitioners in the health sciences. With a focus on allied health professionals, libraries are an important part of their strategy.
DIRECTIONS AND TRENDS
Where Do We Come From?
This year marks the 350th anniversary of the journal; it can be shocking to realize that for most of those 350 years, the journal looked pretty much the same. Publishers put together a bunch of articles in a paper journal format and sent it out. Then the World Wide Web came along, and a lot of change has happened in a relatively short period of time. Publishers and libraries have had to change dramatically in the past 20 years, and they’ll likely have to change a lot in the next 20.
Where are We Going?
Marks frequently asks her team to think about where the scholarly publishing world is going. She has no answers, but the exercise of looking for answers can be illuminating. Marks and her team are trying to understand what is impacting their world so they can answer questions like what to do next, which direction to go in, what experiments to try, and what’s going on with books. With books there has been a massive amount of change, but not as consistent as with journals. Different kinds of book publishing have gone in different directions at different speeds.
Popular Assumptions
Marks has heard lots of assumptions about journal publishing, including the following:
Open Access (OA) is the answer to everything.
Institutions can publish their own journals so there will be no need for publishers.
Publishers do not really add any value.
On the textbook side, there are some different assumptions:
Students do not need or buy textbooks.
Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with Open Educational Resources will take over, so there will not need to be traditional publishers.
Textbook Publishers Are Not Adding Enough Value
STM article output continues to grow relentlessly. Output is growing by 3.5% each year, while library budgets are often flat or declining. This is correlated with a growing number of people working in research and development globally.Footnote1 Library budgets are flat at best, and budgets are growing the least in North America.Footnote2 This is certainly a challenge. Another noticeable trend for publishers is the rise in the number of papers submitted from China. There’s enormous pressure on Chinese PhD students to publish in Western journals, which helps to explain that trend.
Technology Trends
Marks shared a poster of technology trends from the STM association.Footnote3 One of the identified trends in journal publishing is linking out to videos, podcasts, and data. Another trend is that data sets are being treated as research objects publishable in their own right, rather than merely the information that leads to publications such as journal articles. Publishers are increasingly thinking about data curation and publication. The final trend identified in the poster is reputation management. People often publish to build their own reputation, rather than just to share knowledge. There are more and more metrics to track this now, for individual researchers and their institutions.
Print Publication
If Marks could wave a magic wand to get rid of all print and go totally digital, that would be much easier than the current situation. In medicine particularly, there is a strong demand for print. An internally conducted survey of healthcare workers in the United States found that 50% of physicians want print in addition to other formats. Students also tend to want print for textbooks. While journals may be primarily online, some disciplines such as medicine and the humanities still have robust print scholarship. Pharmaceutical advertising is based entirely on print journals, so it actually keeps subscriber costs down to print, due to advertising revenue.
According to Wolters Kluwer’s survey, books are far preferred in print by doctors and nurses. Student spending is divided between test prep materials and textbooks, but only 37% buy new copies of their textbooks. They have an array of options for getting a copy, including renting or directly borrowing from a friend.
Open Access
Looking at Open Access mandates, the most growth is from institutional mandates. There is also a substantial number of funder mandates, and a small number of sub-institutional and multi-institutional mandates.Footnote4 As far as publishers are concerned, OA is here to stay as another business model. The degree of penetration and the preferred model varies greatly by discipline. There is a strong emphasis on Green OA in physics and earth sciences. In medicine and biochemistry there is more emphasis on Gold OA.Footnote5
Data Curation
The discussion of research data is growing all the time. Many funding bodies are now demanding a data curation plan of some kind, but researchers are confused about what that might mean. How would that apply to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, or specialized medical software used to analyze this data? Some funders may not be sure what it means either. Publishers are also unsure what’s expected of them. There are also some substantial privacy issues, especially in the medical field.
Summary of Trends
There are pressures on costs and revenues, and demands for publishers, librarians, and authors to do more. There is an influx of papers, which puts pressure on editors and is contributing to an influx of new journals in smaller niche areas. There are more and more formats to contend with, especially with mobile devices. Open Access mandates require technical and process development from publishers and libraries. Increasing regulation in the United States is driving revenue out of medical publishing and driving some pharmaceutical research out of the country.
RESPONDING TO TRENDS
How are medical publishers responding? Wolters Kluwer Health is trying to understand all of their customers and meet their needs from current awareness to point of care to research to clinical learning. From libraries to doctors, nurses, and students, publishers are trying to give them what they need to know, and in the way they want it. They have conducted interviews, site visits, and tried other ways of getting feedback.
Publishing Models
Marks has had conversations with librarians enthusiastic about Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA). However, an effective PDA program requires a book platform that can effectively track usage in a very granular way. It can be very challenging without an enormous volume of books, and there are a lot of difficulties on the back end. Many publishing systems are 50 years old, and most of the rest date to the 1990s. Because of that, it can be difficult to adapt to new developments.
Marks’ company is working on new business models, including Gold and Hybrid OA and a new model they are calling Platinum OA. Under this model, which is being applied in emerging markets, the institution that owns a journal may be a society or a government, and they pay all costs associated with publication. The publisher provides services, authors submit papers without any fees, and anyone can read articles online for free. Mission driven institutions pay the necessary costs and readers who want a Portable Document Format (PDF) file or other access beyond reading online pay a small fee.
Wolters Kluwer Health has turned at least one journal from a subscription model to a fully OA model. They have also launched several fully Gold OA journals. In addition, they have launched non-OA journals with society backing or subscription bundling. It’s very difficult to make ad-supported journals viable online. However, Wolters Kluwer Health is working on services for digital distribution of publications to comply with the Sunshine Act.Footnote6 Under this act, pharmaceutical companies would need to log free print articles supplied to physicians as gifts, and that can be very time consuming. As a result, there are new opportunities for digital distribution services tailored to these companies’ needs.
Editorial Models
Post-publication commentary has been a popular topic, but it can be difficult to attract commenters due to reputation management concerns. Researchers going through tenure may be hesitant to offer negative commentary. Open peer review can be difficult to implement for the same reasons, but it is likely to gather momentum. Community peer review came under some recent criticism. In this model, a group of reviewers comment online, and an author can then respond to the comments. Editors at Frontiers journals recently raised concerns about a lack of quality and control, and they were removed as a result.Footnote7
Independent companies are providing peer review services from full review to pre–peer review. Non-English-speaking authors now have the option to hire consultants for translation, editing, and ethical compliance services to improve their chances of getting publications accepted. There are also services to recommend publication venues based on the content of an article. It may be too soon to say whether such services are having an impact, though editors tell Marks they are not seeing real change yet.
New companies are appearing every couple of weeks with new services. Unfortunately, some of the experiments that sound great do not end up working out. Often, authors just want their research published and readers just want content. Even when a new technology could make researchers’ lives easier, they may not use it if they can already get PDFs of content they are looking for. However, that should not and will not halt experimentation.
CONCLUSION
Publishers need to be customer facing, engaging, experimental, and listen closely to users; they cannot just send stuff to subscription agents once a year. We all have to be much more involved in the scholarly communications process and tuned in to what users need. This will be very different in different markets. University presses will hear different things from humanities scholars than Marks hears from physicians. They may want monographs, for example, which are not relevant to most physicians. Public policies are driving innovation in scholarly communication, especially with OA. New guidelines for textbooks in health emphasize systems over methods. This is having a big impact on courses and textbook publishing. The role for publishers is unclear in some new areas such as the creation of data repositories.
Free experiences drive engagement. Marks recently decided to try a MOOC from Coursera and saw how they are offering education for free but charging for a certificate or credential. Revenue comes from new places. Identifying and solving customer problems is driving new opportunities. Journals and books will become content to be used in new ways.
NOTES FROM THE Q&A
The percentage of revenues that goes to a publisher’s different areas has changed without a doubt. You can look at what it costs to produce an article and upload it. There’s the cost of systems and IT. When Marks first started, there was no IT department. Now, publishers are competing in the marketplace for good IT professionals. Sophisticated systems are necessary to meet user needs and expectations.
Awareness of OA is not universal, and many academics who are fully engaged in scholarly communications may not be that familiar with it. You can get so immersed in OA issues that you forget not everyone knows about it. When Marks and some colleagues first presented OA options to society partners, those partners did not know what it meant for them. They did not know about OA mandates and were confused by some of the issues. People familiar with the issues need to take a step back and explain the basics.
There is a proliferation of new publishers and journals. In some cases, those new publishers are operating in bad faith and trying to attract revenue from scholars. Wolters Kluwer Health has run into some suspicion with their Platinum model, simply because they are not charging anything. It can be difficult at times to distinguish earnest but inexperienced actors from others who are clearly only interested in extracting money. Researchers are receiving direct solicitations from journals that have similar names to existing journals and charge huge fees for quick publication. Marks would like librarians to be more involved in educating students on this. Students need to be taught this so that they can choose responsibly when they become young researchers. We can also work with the earnest but inexperienced players so that they know how to distinguish themselves from frauds.
Traditionally, publishers produced materials and libraries provided stewardship. Now, publishers have more of an archival role, as libraries only license access to content. Given that archival access is not always a money making proposition and publishers may go out of business, this does not always appear to be a sustainable model. This is a particular worry for OA. There is no revenue stream at all for old content. The only revenue streams are from when authors submit new work. With subscription journals, there are some revenue streams for archival access. It’s important to get content in Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS), Portico, and other archives, especially for OA content. Marks was at Sage when they had a Portico journal cease publication. It was the first and nobody knew how to do it, but they were excited to test the process and eager to show librarians they had a solution.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jayne Marks
Jayne Marks is Vice President, Global Publishing at Wolters Kluwer Health and a Board Member of the International Association of STM Publishers.
Chris Bulock
Chris Bulock is Electronic Resources Librarian at California State University Northridge.
Notes
1. Michael Mabe and Mayur Amin, “Growth Dynamics of Scholarly and Scientific Journals,” Scientometrics 51, no. 1 (2001): 158.
2. Publishers Communication Group, Library Budget Predictions for 2015 (Boston, MA: Publishers Communication Group, 2015), http://www.pcgplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Library-Budget-Predictions-for-2015.pdf (accessed July 23, 2015).
3. STM Association, “STM Tech Trends 2015,” http://www.stm-assoc.org/standards-technology/resources/tech-trends-2015/ (accessed July 18, 2015).
4. Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies, “Policies Adopted by Quarter,” graph on the ROARMAP website, http://roarmap.eprints.org/ (accessed July 23, 2015).
5. Mark Ware and Michael Mabe, The STM Report: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Journal Publishing, 4th ed. (The Hague, The Netherlands: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, 2015) 31–34, http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf (accessed July 23, 2015).
6. “Physician Financial Transparency Reports (Sunshine Act),” American Medical Association, http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/advocacy/topics/sunshine-act-and-physician-financial-transparency-reports.page? (accessed October 23, 2015).
7. Martin Enserink, “Open-Access Publisher Sacks 31 Editors Amid Fierce Row Over Independence,” ScienceInsider May 20, 2015, http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2015/05/open-access-publisher-sacks-31-editors-amid-fierce-row-over-independence (accessed July 18, 2015).