advertising the percentage of revenue comprised by subscriptions and licenses is more like 55%, with advertising at 35% (Credit Suisse First Boston, 2004, p. 27, Fig. 37).
Ultimately, decisions about what to publish are determined by the scientists themselves, in the persons of journal editors-in-chief, editorial boards, and peer reviewers. Scientific publishing is a communications loop within the community of scientists, who act as authors, editors, reviewers, and users, with publishers providing infrastructure, enabling technologies, capital, organization, and domain expertise in publishing.
Publishers look to librarians as an extremely important voice of the scientist/user. Working together with librarians, publishers know better how to reach the end users. In Section V we discuss specific areas where publishers and librarians can work together especially closely to improve the services that we jointly provide to scientific researchers.
as the number of personal subscriptions held by scientists declines. One study, for example, shows that in a university setting in 1977, 60% of reading came from personal subscriptions and 25% from library subscriptions, but by 1990 – 1993, 36% of readings were from personal subscriptions and 54%
from libraries (Tenopir and King, 2000, p. 30).
B. Marketing to Users and Acquirers
Prior to ubiquitous availability of electronic versions of journals, reference works, handbooks, encyclopedias and the other content types favored among scientific publishers, library purchasing decisions were made on a title-by- title basis. Bibliographers or subject specialists reviewed the content available in the areas for which they were responsible, then worked within the selection processes dictated by their organization either making the final decision about purchases or recommending selections to a committee or manager who had final budget and decision-making authority.
Orders for journals were placed through one or more subscription agents and payments to publishers were processed through agents who collected fees throughout the preceding year and then, less their discounts, passed these on to publishers. Until the accounts were tallied, publishers had no way of knowing how their journal renewal rates (or in the case of new titles, subscription rates) were faring. On the other side of the transaction, libraries making decisions at the title level could face a wide range of price increases even among the titles of one publisher and had no recourse except to choose not to renew a title if the price was found excessive relative to its value.
STM publishers did not employ direct sales representatives to broker their journal content, so marketers, working closely with their editorial colleagues, were organized within publishers much as bibliographers are organized within libraries: subject specialists managed the message that the publisher wanted to convey to a narrowly focused user and selector community.
Marketing staff remain engaged with the communities they are charged with serving. Marketing managers attend relevant scientific meetings and conferences. They often visit customers, arranging to speak with decision makers and “influencers.” They work closely with editorial colleagues to manage the needs of editorial boards and staff. In this capacity, they also act as a valuable conduit of informationfrom the marketto the publishing house.
Journal editors are also authors and users of STM content; publishers rely on them to act as representative voices for their fellow researchers. This constant communication “loop” allows publishers to maintain currency, and therefore to adapt better to the changes in the fields in which they publish.
Managing a limited marketing budget, these subject-oriented marketing specialists face the challenge of making sure that the message that they are communicating is received by the appropriate person(s). In almost all cases selection decisions are made by more than one person and the message that publishers need to convey may take several forms, customized to the particular recipients.
The role of the librarian also needs to be considered within a geographic or cultural context. Librarians in parts of Asia, for instance, often have a different role in decision-making authority relative to the faculties they support compared to their western counterparts. The faculty are more closely involved in the buying decision and often manage the budget that funds such purchases. While the librarians cannot be ignored, the faculty role may be much more direct and influential than in North America or Europe in purchasing decisions. In other regions, subscription agents may play a much bigger role than in the US or Western Europe. In Mexico, publicly funded libraries must bid on content every year, a highly competitive process managed by agents. Publishers in these cases may be quite divorced from the decision maker, and therefore must keep the information brokers involved and informed.
Complicating all of this is the vast proliferation of electronic, web-based offerings of publishers. All major and most minor STM publishers, including societies, have directly or indirectly made their content available via the Web.
This change, affecting all stages of the publishing process, has led to major changes in marketing and selling content to information seekers. And of course, libraries have had to adapt as well, now having to meet the needs of the so-called “virtual patron.”
Up to this point, patrons had to travel to a physical place—generally the library—where the physical artifacts were housed and archived. Often the process of finding and retrieving the information necessitated the involve- ment of a librarian. The user of library-funded resources may continue to use the finding aids provided by the library, but is now likely to be able to access these resources from his or her desk rather than going to a separate repository. This has had profound impact on library usage and the ways in which libraries serve their customers, just as electronic publishing has had a similarly profound impact on the way publishers serve their customers: the self-same authors and libraries.
C. New Models of Selling Content
The most fundamental change in the commercial relationship between libraries and publishers has been the shift away from the “terminal
transaction.” That is, when only purchasing print, the buyer paid a fee (in most cases, the “list price”) and received the product (journal/book/whatever) and while publishers sought to maintain an ongoing relationship with the libraries that bought their non-monographic products, there was no requirement that they do so. In the Web environment, however, the relationship between the library (assuming for this purpose, the library is the consumer) and the publisher is much more iterative. Publishers have moved from offering content for purchase in a one-time transaction to an ongoing licensing relationship, in which the library pays fees regularly to maintain access to the content offered via the publisher or intermediary’s website.
There are, of course, variations on this involving, for example, archival rights, perpetual access, print vs. electronic-only, but the rights and responsibilities inherent in this kind of transaction are markedly different from the sale of print products.
At the advent of this new period in publishing, publishers and libraries found that they lacked staff familiar with electronic publishing. Acting to change this, library schools and practicing librarians began to focus on electronic offerings. Libraries created new positions such as “Electronic Resource Officers.” Publishers did the same, adding technical staff to manage their electronic services, educating editorial and production staff in new methods of publishing electronic content, and adding marketing and sales staff to negotiate usage and pricing terms with customers.
Offering content in new ways meant that users were no longer bound by the same restrictions of time and location that they had been when content was only available in print at the library. While this was recognized as a new and exciting era for publishers, it also caused concern about protecting the validity and provenance of intellectual property in the new electronic environment; publishers wanted to continue to effectively disseminate and protect the content. Publishers reacted to this by imposing restrictions on the use of electronic content. These limitations included requiring user names and passwords for anyone wanting access to licensed content. Others placed strict geographic limitations (one publisher authenticated users by Internet Protocol (IP) address but tried to ensure that access was only within one building). Often these restrictions conflicted with both the intentions and the technological infrastructure of libraries. University libraries, for instance, often could not distinguish their IP ranges from those of an academic department. User names and passwords for all but the most arcane material simply could not be administered effectively in a large academic or global corporate environment.
Since that time, publishers found more moderate methods, such as IP or proxy address authentication, of providing access to content, so that users have the access they need to content when they need it, without unnecessary
obstructions, but risks remain (the recent experience of the music recording industry gives pause to owners and distributors of intellectual property). This added functionality has also led users to have new requirements and expectations, to which publishers and librarians have to respond with astonishing speed. Users have quickly grown dependent, for example, on linking arrangements between primary and secondary resources, and expect that these resources will be available to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from their desktops.
Publishers realized that in the transition from a print-based business to new electronic focused licensing arrangements, new pricing metrics would have to be developed and tested. Tenopir and King (2000, p. 44) state it clearly: “Pricing will be the most important issue that publishers, libraries, and scientists will face over the next decade.” Questions quickly arose about how to ensure that the business that publishers already had could be preserved, while presumably the increased utility and extended “reach” of the electronic version of content would increase its value for customers and users.
Publishers also made significant investments in technology to make their content available electronically, and it was expected that these investments would be recouped in increased sales. Libraries, however, often assume that if publishers no longer have to produce as much print, costs of the same content available electronically will remain neutral or even decline.Tenopir and King (2000, p. 372, citing Odlyzko, Boyce and others)cite at least two studies that conclude that the costs associated with publishing electronic journals “do not decrease appreciably” relative to print publishing costs. In most cases, this tension has led to a conservative response. Publishers have often based the pricing for electronic content on a customer’s historical print spending.
Long-term licenses (those for more than a single year) can also offer customers more favorable terms.
At the same time, the role of library consortia has expanded rapidly.
Academic libraries turned to the consortium to which they belonged to manage the process of negotiating licenses for newly available content.
Today, consortia often represent a large proportion of STM publishers’
customers. The buying and negotiating clout of these consortia led publishers to consider new ways to maintain and grow their business with the consortium’s members. Publishers offer incentives to consortium members to secure licensing agreements; typically, this is access to content to which the library would not have access if it acted alone. For this access to new content, the library paid little or no cost beyond its own subscription-based fees. For instance, if two libraries, A and B, are members of a consortium and each has subscriptions from publisher X (A has 20 and B has 30 titles), the publisher might offer access to both the titles to which the library subscribes but also to any titles subscribed to by the other consortium member. In this example,
A would gain access to at least 10 new titles to which it had previously had no subscription. B would gain access to any of the 20 in A’s collection to which it did not already have a subscription.
Publishers embraced this idea because the opportunity cost is low, and the value it delivers to customers is substantial. Growth in the journal business generally comes from taking market share, not from significant growth in library subscriptions. Consortium arrangements generally included proscriptions against cancellations during the license term, so the publisher secured its revenue from that group of customers for the license duration.
Similarly, libraries have seen these arrangements as a means of significantly augmenting their collections at modest cost. Instead of having to cut titles, they could, with one license agreement, potentially add literally hundreds of titles to their electronic offerings.
These agreements proliferated in the 1990s involving most library consortia and key STM (and non-STM) publishers. These agreements also mutated. Some consortia were so large that in aggregate its members subscribed to virtually all of a publisher’s titles, and it made sense then to offer the consortium all of a publisher’s titles as the key benefit of the consortium license. Or, more simply, the consortium had such significant negotiating authority that it could simply demand this benefit, and publishers often acquiesced.
These types of licenses, characterized byKen Frazier (2001), University of Wisconsin—Madison Library Director, as “the Big Deal,” have become the subject of much debate among publishers and libraries as both have had time to consider the consequences of these arrangements. Big Deal proponents cite the fact that users no longer face the limitation of having access only to the titles to which the institution subscribed in prior years. For a smaller institution, the Big Deal can expand its scientific journal collection in unprecedented ways. Usage data also bear out the maxim that if content is made available, users will use it. OhioLINK data illustrate this point:
“Between April 2000 and March 2001, of the 1,306,000 articles downloaded, 58% were from journals not held in print at the downloading patron’s library.
For small colleges, 90 – 95% of articles downloaded were from newly accessible electronic journals in 2000” (Tenopir, 2003, p. 19). Publishers like the Big Deal because it acts as a powerful incentive for libraries to sign agreements that secure their revenue for a fixed period of time.
Critics assert that the Big Deal encourages publishers to continue to publish content that is of questionable value; in essence, that these arrangements allow journals that would otherwise “die” to continue to live because they are lumped in with the valuable content the library and its users really need. The case of either side can be bolstered by usage data.
Proponents of the Big Deal cite usage information which shows that if you
make it available, users will access it—and for this access, the institution has paid a fraction of the list prices of the accessed journals. Opponents suggest that this means simply that some use is inevitable, but that if users did not have access to this unsubscribed content, there would be no serious drawbacks;
instead, this casual use creates a false perception that these titles have value that would quickly evaporate if left to actual subscription variations.
These arrangements serve users well, especially at smaller institutions that may have had access to only limited journal resources prior to participating in a consortium’s Big Deal. Publishers like to have their content available to the largest possible user community, because it then gets cited more often, potentially raising their journals’ Impact Factors(see http://
www.isinet.com/essays/journalcitationreports/7.html). Authors like the increased exposure of their articles. In this way, the same content has more value to users simply by virtue of a new pricing and distribution model.
Some of these agreements have now been in place for between 5 and 7 years. As the current licenses are being renegotiated between major consortia and publishers, both are considering the question of whether the Big Deal should continue to be available as a standard pricing model, or whether it needs to be modified or discarded.
Libraries consider this question within an environment of severe budget constraints. Libraries are reviewing the merits of the historical basis of the pricing—and with detailed usage information, are trying to pay less for little used content. Publishers, using the same data (which generally show rapid adoption of the use of their electronic content), assert that these agreements offer significant value for libraries.
It seems unlikely that publishers or libraries will abandon the Big Deal (or its variants) anytime soon, but both are looking for new models that will serve the needs of customers for whom this model is not a good fit. For those customers outside of consortia or for whom the Big Deal is unattractive or for smaller customers, publishers have typically offered alternative options.
However, these models may have limits on what the customer may access, or other usage and access restrictions. Generally, these electronic offerings are also made at the title level. The bottom line seems to be that the Big Deal is a good deal for libraries (and their users) that can afford it, but publishers must offer alternatives for libraries with fewer resources or greater specialization.
D. Technology and New Sales Models
Publishers are also trying to adapt pricing models to different “units” of content; some have referred to this as the “article economy.” In these scenarios, the customer may not be the library, but rather the “end user.”
The user pays “by-the-drink” for the article(s) he or she downloads. In these arrangements, for pricing purposes, it rarely matters which title the article is from, the publisher charges a flat rate per article, whether the journal itself is a relatively high-cost biomedical title or an inexpensive business title. This is certainly easier to administer for publishers and customers, but it fails to account for the perceived relative value of the content. Paying $25, for instance, for an article from a specialized medical journal when it helps to lead a pharmaceutical firm to a multi-million dollar drug discovery would be a bargain. The same article, on the other hand, could be merely ancillary “nice- to-have” reading for other users. Publishers, scientists, and librarians should continue to work together to define more sophisticated measures for value and effectiveness, and to consider together how these measures could be incorporated into new sales models at the article level.
Technology also facilitates the development of new sales models. Present Web services allow use for fixed periods of time, for example. Perhaps libraries will soon pay a fixed fee to have access to selected or all content a publisher offers for a limited period of time (a semester, for instance). Publishers may also offer more granular elements of content: the paragraph, page, or figure.
Some library customers, particularly those outside of academia, have been willing to forego the subscription model entirely, relying instead on delivery of content on an “as needed” basis. Libraries that rely on this “just- in-time” method of securing the content only when sought by a user expect that their needs will be satisfied by document delivery suppliers, interlibrary loan, or publishers themselves via “pay-per-view” functionality. Similarly, some aggregators hope to function as the primary gateway to content from many publishers, figuring that their robust bibliographic records can offer a
“one-stop” option, seamlessly linking to publishers’ sites to access full text.
These issues also have implications for content other than journals, as well as newly available electronic versions of previously published content, e.g., backfiles (digitized versions of old journal volumes not previously available electronically).
Increasingly, publishers are finding that libraries are very interested in backfiles of quality journals. Content in the physical sciences has a much longer “shelf life” than in medicine, and libraries and users want to be able to integrate that older content with the newer content that is available online.
Alternatively, content in computer science may have little value (except to scientific historians) shortly after publication. And as libraries shift their resourcing away from print and towards digital, they want to save shelf space by replacing older print copies with their digital versions.
In addition to different product offerings, publishers need to deal differently with different customer types. Corporate customers sometimes have a different mandate than their academic counterparts in that their users