OA is squeezing society and smaller publishers. Our Head of Marketing and Communications, Emma Watkins asks: is there another path to survival?
FIRST PUBLISHED IN RESEARCH INFORMATION >>> Open access and revenue diversification – Research Information
It’s no secret that the OA movement has hit society and small publisher’s revenues hard in the last few years.
Just this month in UKSG a paper entitled ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ reported that of the 21 societies they monitored the revenue of, 15 ‘have suffered a real-terms decline in their revenues from publishing over the last decade or so’.
Even for those who are managing to publish a lot of OA papers, the revenue deficit compared to previous models is huge – as Delta Think reported in October, ‘around 50% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2023, accounting for just over 20% of corresponding market value’.
Scene-setting aside, a lot of the conversation around this has been on ways that publishers can tweak their models to protect their revenues – read and publish, publish and read, transformative agreements… regardless of the flavour, the focus has remained on making more (or the same) money out of publishing articles. For large commercial publishers, who can squeeze ever more out of their economies of scale to make this work, this makes some sense.
But from my perspective, there are other options. For example, investing in providing a holistic member proposition, pivoting to a more product-led mindset, and bringing together all the un-utilised value currently sitting in different silos, can offer more opportunities for revenue diversification and start to reduce the risk that relying on OA revenue alone brings.
Here are a few ways in which we think society and small publishers can start doing just that, harnessing the technology, content and data that is already at their fingertips:
- Expanding into new markets
Often publishers think about new markets as being geographical. For most, ‘customer’ always boils down to ‘libraries’, or OA ‘authors’. But we’ve seen the value in identifying adjacent sectors that might find access to the insights in your data to be valuable, such as healthcare, education, pharma and policy-making. Consider expanding your definitions of ‘customer’ and ‘markets’ beyond the traditional publishing sphere and building products that meet their needs to create a brand new revenue stream.
- Thinking of your data as a service and packaging it appropriately
There are many examples of partnerships and licensing deals out there – are your data and content in a fit state to take advantage of something similar? Reframe your thinking around those assets to figure out who might also need access, and how they might want to get it. It’s likely a different delivery mechanism than your current one.
- Breaking down siloes
Many societies have publishing arms, events arms, policy arms and CPD/education arms. All of these generate information that could offer your members comprehensive intelligence and secure your position as the one must-have place for them to stay up-to-date in their field. Bringing together these previously disparate data sets and services will create a bigger value proposition for your members, as well as inspire ideas for new products and services.
- Make AI work for you – and your users
It wouldn’t be a column from me without a mention of AI, but specifically here there is an opportunity to use AI to create tools that offer researchers new ways to interact with content – or ways for your content to find new audiences. For existing users, integrating conversational search and interrogation interfaces, or providing highly specialised tailored summaries, might increase the stickiness of your content which can have a direct impact on cost-per-download and advertising revenue. Meanwhile, opening up your content to new audiences with AI-generated audio and video content might help engage new markets – for example, creating a regular podcast aimed towards policy makers or the media.
- Tidying up your tech stack to enable mergers and acquisitions
For a lot of society publishers, battling with legacy systems and processes is just part of the territory. But it’s a barrier to being flexible enough to take advantage quickly of mergers and acquisitions, where the pressure is on to realise value fast. If this is a route you are interested in, we strongly recommend a technology audit to see where you’ll need to make changes to ensure quick and seamless integrations with new partners or acquired assets.
It is both a turbulent and an important time to be working within scholarly publishing. While it seems like we have been talking about open access and its implications for a long time, it’s really only a blip within the larger history of scholarly publishing, and it’s a blip which has fundamentally changed the way societies especially fund their important activities.
At a time when misinformation and disinformation is challenging all areas of academic rigour, making sure societies and smaller publishers survive feels more crucial than ever. But to do so, they need to reassess the ways in which they do business, and find ways to capitalise on all the value they do currently hold.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, we’re seeing publishers from around the world being innovative and ambitious in their plans, from AIPP running AI-led data experiments to drive decision-making, to Bone & Joint rebuilding their entire content platform to enable new product development that creates a holistic ecosystem for their community.
There is plenty to do, but also plenty of innovative and passionate people in publishing to do it. They just need to remember that the future will absolutely not look anything like the past.
