Perspectives

In this interview, C&E's Colleen Scollans talks to change management expert Charlotte Talmage of Uuna about how scholarly publishers and societies can more effectively manage change.

Transformative Agreements (TAs) are increasingly popular with publishers and institutions. However, they create significant challenges for the society partners of publishers. It is incumbent on societies to engage in frank discussions with their publisher about the impact of the publisher’s open access strategy and TAs on the society’s journals. It is critical to model, as more of the journal becomes open access via TAs, how the society journal’s different revenue streams will be impacted.

Campaign planning is essential to creating marketing efficiency and impact. A campaign planning model allows organizations to effectively prioritize, optimize, and evaluate marketing campaigns. It helps publishers, associations, and education service providers reduce marketing fragmentation and build cross-functional alignment around marketing priorities and resource and technology needs.

An audience-centric mindset is table-stakes to growing revenues and competing in the OA world. A data-driven audience strategy serves not only an organization’s current customers, but also the broader global audience that engages with its products, content, and brand. In this article, we explore what it takes for publishers and associations to build an effective audience strategy.

In this insightful Q&A with Nicko Goncharoff of Osmanthus Consulting, with whom C&E partnered to develop International STM Publishing in China: State of the Market Report 2023 – we explore China’s recent publishing sector and research assessment reforms. We demonstrate how international publishers and publishing service providers can navigate the dynamic and unique China market.

This article is part two of our Author Experience (AX) series, where we anchor the concept of AX more concretely. We present our model for working towards AX maturity: positive author perceptions that translate to increased article submission, resubmission, and referral. As organizations advance the six pillars outlined in this article, they progress their AX maturity and set themselves up for success in today’s evolving publishing landscape.

A seismic shift has taken place in scholarly publishing, putting authors forefront of marketing efforts. This is not just a shift in messaging. Marketing to authors requires new tools, techniques, and expertise. Publishers that are able to make this transition more rapidly are gaining a competitive advantage over those that move slower.  

At the heart of all successful organizations is a well-planned and executed marketing strategy. While successful marketing strategies incorporate some tried-and-true practices and marketing disciplines, increasingly, they rely on understanding and harnessing marketing technology.

The optimal marketing structure is a critical component of a successful marketing function. It is also an intensely debated topic. The structural debate is often framed as a binary choice between a centralized structure and a decentralized structure. Since both centralized and decentralized structures have compelling advantages and notable drawbacks, organizations feel as if they are faced with an impossible choice. Fortunately, there is another, and much better, way forward.

A major element of the scholarly and professional publishing ecosystem is the publishing services agreement, or PSA. In a PSA a professional association or learned society signs an agreement with a larger publisher for journal publishing services. What many societies negotiating a PSA fail to see, however, is that the large publisher has access to a great deal more information about the publishing business than the society does. This essential asymmetry of information provides an enormous advantage to the large publisher in negotiations.