Re: Publsihers' view/reply to David Prosser

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <chief-exec@alpsp.org>]

There seems to be a misconception of what marketing amounts to in the
digital age.

First of all, any journal needs to market primarily to authors - if they
aren't aware of your title and its appropriateness for their paper, of
course they won't submit to it.  The wide unawareness of OA journals in
their field is one significant obstacle to their uptake.

Secondly, a journal needs to be made as visible as possible to its
readers. This does not happen by magic.  A great deal of effort is
required to get a journal included in the key abstracting and indexing
databases (which are the preferred route for about half of all journal
use).  Work is required to maximise visibility in search engines (and
OAI).  And links to and from both citations and secondary databases - one
of the most valuable features of online journals, according to numerous
surveys - require considerable work; you'd be amazed how often citations
supplied by authors are not accurate enough to be linkable without
cleaning up.

None of this goes away if the journal is free to readers!

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fytton Rowland" <J.F.Rowland@lboro.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 12:36 AM
Subject: Re: Publsihers' view/reply to David Prosser

> Prosser:
> >>We have not (as far as I am aware) seen any publishers give us
> >>their vision of the future based on subscription access - is it really
> >>business as usual?
>
> Esposito:
> >>I consult to publishers and would say that (among publishers)
> >>though there are areas of consensus, the future is generally pretty
> >>muddy.  The consenus areas concern the naivete about the costs of
> >>publication on the part of many Open Access advocates.  (snip)
>
> Is it really naivete on the part of OA advocates, or an inability to
> "think out of the box" on the part of publishers?  There has been much
> debate over recent years, on this list among others, about just what is
> essential expenditure ("The Cost of the Essentials"). Many of the "bells
> and whistles" that publishers think are needed in scholarly publishing are
> not necessarily wanted by academics.  Those debating are not all naive;
> many of us are academics ourselves and have a reasonable sense of what
> academics want. Those who have established new OA titles in recent years
> and are *not* traditional publishers work on "zero-based budgeting", while
> established scholarly publishers find it difficult to think in ways other
> than "What changes from the old system?"  The former come out with lower
> costs that the latter.
>
> Esposito:
> >>And the notion that research publications don't have to have a
> >>market made for them goes into the naive category. (snip)
>
> It is well established that schoalrly publications are not a "market" in
> the normal sense, since each article is (or should be) a monopoly product
> - you can only get that article from that one journal.  It is also well
> established that the market that matters to scholarly publishers is the
> *author* market, not the reader market.  It is a very imperfect market
> because he who pays the piper (libraries mostly) does not call the tune.
> So far as market *making* is concerned, the very experienced marketing
> manager of the scientific publisher for whom I used to work was of the
> view that mounting promotional campaigns for established schoalrly
> journals was pointless.  Every institution who might have a use for them
> already knew about them, and whether they bought them or not depended on
> the budget they had available and how far up the pecking order our
> journals were.  No-one needed telling about them.  He concentrated his
> efforts on the marketing of books and bibliographic databases.
>
> Esposito:
> >>But the Internet changes everything.
>
> There we can agree!  But in particular, it changes students' behaviour -
> and will as time goes on change the behaviour of older people too - in the
> direction of using Internet search engines to look for all their
> information.  So if my papers are availableon the Internet, free of
> charge, suitably indexed with metadata, they will be found.  No need for
> marketing departments at scholarly publishers......  This example
> illustates both my previous points quite nicely.
>
> Fytton Rowland,
> Loughborough University, UK.