business models Collection

Historical analysis of bibliometric trends shows scholarly publishing market consolidation over the years. These changes are linked to the emergence of The Big Deal subscription model and Open Access initiatives that have forced publishers into a rapid shift towards new business models focused on volume and scalability.

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.

C&E Managing Partner Michael Clarke moderated a panel at the STM Conference 2023 in Frankfurt on the shift to open access (OA) publishing models and the potential for OA to improve research visibility and impact. The discussion covered current OA models, progress to date in the transition to OA, and how STM publishers can continue to adapt and evolve.

Conferences are so deeply embedded in the culture and cadence of science and academia that it is hard to imagine what professional life would look like without them. Many organizations are looking to replace conferences with virtual events, but simply streaming the same sessions on the same schedule may prove insufficient. Shifting meetings to virtual formats requires reconceptualizing meetings for the needs of attendees working from home — and rethinking business models, technologies, and processes as well. Societies and associations with annual meetings will need to think the implications for member engagement and member renewals, manuscript recruitment, education, and other ripple effects.

Plan S implementation guidance has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers. The stated aim of Plan S is to achieve “full and immediate Open Access to publications from publicly funded research,” but the prohibition against publishing in hybrid journals is not needed to accomplish that aim.

For all the talk of disruption, scientific publishing in fact has not been disrupted. The reasons for this are rooted in the culture of scientific communication and the functions of scientific journals—functions that have developed over hundreds of years. Those predicting seismic changes to the business of journal publishing because of advances in communication technology have been consistently frustrated. The World Wide Web itself was designed explicitly to disrupt scientific publishing, and yet here we are.