Re: Is it time to stop printing journals?

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

Anthony raises an important point. Although I agree with others 
that institutional print subscriptions could disappear tomorrow 
without much fuss, member and non-member individual subscriptions 
to society journals are a different story. In medical societies, 
at least, many, and often a large majority, of readers are 
individuals working in clinical settings outside research 
institutions. With more limited access to online collections and 
a work focus that is not research based, these readers often do 
rely on print as their primary medium.

There is another factor inhibiting the elimination of print for 
individual subscriptions: advertising. For medical journals with 
significant ad income, there is reluctance on the part of the 
publishers to allow individuals to have an online-only option. 
Most societies that I know continue to bundle individual online 
access with a print subscription--in part, because that does seem 
to be user preference, and, in part, because it serves to 
preserve a stable base of print advertising. For most societies, 
revenue from online advertising doesn't come close to advertising 
revenue from print.

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
Fairfax, VA 22030
pbanks@bankspub.com
www.bankspub.com
www.associationpublisher.com/blog/

On 3/31/07 3:21 PM, "Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>
wrote:

> I work as a publisher in an area where many of the journals are 
> membership journals and the members often do not have access to 
> an academic library. These are specialist dentists who do not 
> write papers for learned journals but need to keep up with the 
> research. In Europe such people seem to be able to access an 
> e-version but there is a general view in the US that the US 
> equivalents need print. I wonder if this is one of those areas 
> where generalisations do not work and one size does not fit all 
> or are the publishers or rather the learned societies who 
> partner with them are being too conservative in their approach 
> to saving money? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Greg 
> Tananbaum" <gtananbaum@gmail.com> To: 
> <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu> Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 
> 12:49 AM Subject: Re: Is it time to stop printing journals?
>
>> Scott Plutchak from UAB writes in his blog response:
>>
>> "We certainly don't need to keep the print to satisfy our user
>> base.  Two years ago we stopped getting any print for our
>> ScienceDirect titles.  I did not get a single question, comment,
>> or expression of concern from faculty or students.  We've reached
>> the point where librarians tend to worry a lot more about the
>> print than the people who use our libraries do."
>>
>> I am curious to hear whether this is a commonly held sentiment.
>> In other words, do the librarians on this list have the sense
>> that their patrons are operating in a post-print world (not in
>> the OA/PMC/Battle Royale sense of the term, but meaning have we
>> outgrown print)?  If so, this would be a remarkable shift, and a
>> remarkably quick one.  Certainly when I helped launch The
>> Berkeley Electronic Press in 2000, print was sacrosanct.  The
>> idea of a viable electronic-only journal publisher was met with
>> feedback running the wide gamut from skepticism to scorn.  If
>> this equation has indeed flipped in a matter of a half-dozen or
>> so years, this ranks as one of the most important periods in
>> scholarly communication history.
>>
>> Best, Greg
>>
>> Greg Tananbaum
>> gtananbaum@gmail.com