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Putting a Price on It: The Changing Nature of Society Publishing
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Putting a Price on It: The Changing Nature of Society Publishing
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Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: Joining me today are Rod Cookson from IWA Publishing, Ann Michael from Delta Think, Sean Sanders from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Miranda Walker from Wolters Kluwer Health. And I'm really excited to have this panel together because I know or I've worked with everyone here and these folks have amazing perspectives and lots of ideas about what we're going to talk about today. So we're talking about the future of Society Publishing.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I've now been in the publishing industry for 20 years and before this webinar today, I had to step back and I tried to think about how Society Publishing has changed in just the past five, and I came back with two observations. At a macro level, very little has changed. There is also as much audience business model and product experimentation within society publishers as there are at big commercial publishers, and that's surprising to think about, giving the scale and financial advantages big commercial publishers can have.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And that everybody who's been talking about big structural changes to our market must be awfully patient. So we know there's a lot of structural pressures facing societies. We, I think, have been talking about aging memberships or the graying members since I joined publishing a long time ago, slower revenue growth or even revenue consolidation or contraction, shocks in the industry where COVID or Plan S where you'd think that Society, because of their scale is in a poor position to adapt than a big commercial publisher.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And all of it makes it very surprising to me that societies and folks who work for societies are still very optimistic. And they're talking about innovation and new products and offers and experimentation in ways commercial players aren't. And it is awfully inspiring. So we wanted to get this group together today to talk about the future of Society Publishing.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we're going to do it in I think four different areas. We're going to talk a bit about business models, where Rod and IWA Publishing are doing some work with Subscribe to Open. Around new audiences and new content formats, where Sean has some unique perspective working with custom publishing at AAAS Science Magazine. Around new products, where Ann has a lot of experience from her work at Delta Think and helping Societies with their forward looking strategy.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And then some absolutes. We know that there are some things that Societies hold near and dear that they won't want to change going forward. So the format is this. I'm going to tee up a question, the panelists are going to discuss it-- they should feel free to interject to ask questions of each other-- and then Stephanie and I will be reading the chat or looking at the questions you've submitted along the way, and we'll interject them as appropriate.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So I am just a facilitator or guide, I'll try to gently steer us through the areas, but essentially where we go is completely up to the panelists and those folks joining us digitally. So let's start with business models, if we can. And of course, there has been a lot of discussion and I think early success with the Subscribe to Open model, but I think has meant a lot of changes for societies and how they operate, how they structure their systems, how they engage their stakeholder community.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And Rod, if it's all right, can we start with you, and just say, do you see societies being set up for success in a Subscribe to Open model?
ROD COOKSON: Thanks, Will. Thanks for that very nice intro. And good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see so many people joining this session. Yeah, so Subscribe to Open. So IWA Publishing has switched 10 journals to open access this year with a Subscribe to Open model. And if you're not familiar with Subscribe to Open, it means keeping subscribers supporting a journal and using the revenue from the subscriptions to pay for open access.
ROD COOKSON: So there's no APCs, there's no sort of transactional costs. It's very much the system, as was it gets open access delivered immediately, and it's certainly working very well for us this year. As to your question, Will. Are societies set up well? A lot of the elements of Subscribe to Open are just the same as the previous existing subscription system.
ROD COOKSON: So if a society has their subscriptions in good order, if they start planning for the next year well in advance-- we work with Knowledge Unlatched, and they started work on 2020 renewals alongside us back in May, so they are already-- what does that make, five months-- into next year's renewal campaign. And the communication is good. The community is engaged.
ROD COOKSON: I think societies are very well set up. The piece that is perhaps trickier for societies is it's quite a paradigm shift. It's quite a big change. There's some new things in a model like Subscribe to Open, and every society needs to have a think about those components and are they at a point where they're ready to make that change? What I would say about our experience is on things like metrics, we are getting vastly higher usage.
ROD COOKSON: Usage for the subscription journals as was the S2O journals is something like 3 and 1/2 times what it was last year in the comparable months, and it's about seven times what it was the year before. So it's not quite an order of magnitude increase in two years, but it's getting on for that kind of change. We're running ahead with submissions. We're about 10% ahead of last year. Anecdotally, I think some publishers saw a dip this year after a big increase last year with COVID and the pandemic.
ROD COOKSON: But the thing we're really most interested in is the feedback we've got from the community. We're an international association. Our mission really is to serve researchers and practitioners everywhere, all countries. And we did an OK job before in Europe and North America and Australasia, perhaps Japan and China. But there were an awful lot of places we weren't being read very well.
ROD COOKSON: Our journals really are being read literally everywhere now. We've got incredibly good feedback from our community, generally. And I think one of the things that's starting to come across quite strongly from librarians is the equity component of a program like Subscribe to Open. It's a very fair way of making open access happen. I saw an article yesterday-- a preprint I've not seen before-- which is based on some of the Elsevier mirror journals, and they've been analyzing those and found that the author base for those mirror open access journals is very, very similar to the parent journals, except there are very few authors from low income countries.
ROD COOKSON: They've kind of been chopped out of the APC mirror journals. What we've found with Subscribe to Open is the opposite. It's bringing more people into the group. It's bringing a wider selection of researchers from around the world into our journals. It really is helping us deliver on mission. The logistics are very familiar. The same logistics as the subscription model. The mission alignment for us is fantastic.
ROD COOKSON: There's a big psychological change. There's a bit of a leap into the dark. That's kind of difficult. But our experience so far is it's working really well and we're really pleased with the upsides.
WILL SCHWEITZER: That's great to hear. Rod, one of the things that I've been thinking about, particularly since I've been at big commercial publishers and smaller societies, was the strength and number of relationships you have with society partners. And that's one of those things where it seems to lend itself to scale advantage, if you think about a big commercial publisher and just the sheer number of sales reps they may have, or how actively they can manage some of their sales agents or channel sales partners.
WILL SCHWEITZER: How is IWAP thinking about those library relationships or approaching them?
ROD COOKSON: Yeah. I think it's been a good discipline for us that we're spending a lot more time talking to customers and listening to customers. Sometimes they've got things to say that we don't necessarily want to hear, but I think the change of model for us has meant we need to engage those people, those librarians, those consortia, some funders a lot more than we used to. So we're having many more conversations.
ROD COOKSON: I think we're learning things that are useful to us. One sort of broader initiative I think might be worth mentioning is there is a Subscribe to Open community of practice which has formed around publishers like us moving to Subscribe to Open as a model. And there was a publisher group to start off with, but it's very rapidly become a publisher and librarian and consortia group with one or two funders involved.
ROD COOKSON: And it really has become a very good forum for working out how to solve some of the common problems, and take an element of the adversarial relationship that's sometimes used to exist with big deals, with subscriptions in the past, where it's very much who can negotiate the highest price and sort of extract terms. There's a genuine willingness in that community of practice group to come together and work out how do we actually come up with solutions which are good for both sides, which are good for everyone?
ROD COOKSON: So I wouldn't say we're anywhere near finishing that learning process. There's still quite a lot ahead of us to do, but it's been very enlightening. We are talking a lot more, spending lots more of our time engaged with those customers and those people that support our program, and I think we're finding very useful takeaways and very useful lessons that we can incorporate into the business.
ROD COOKSON: So yeah, it's been interesting. It's been educational.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Well, that's great. And I think it's something actually really unique to the publishing industry. I can't think of many parallels out there in other industries where you have, essentially, the level of collaboration between purchasers and consumers, or even cross purchasing groups that doesn't end up in some regulatory body investigation, I guess.
ROD COOKSON: Yeah. We're trying to avoid those areas.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So Miranda, I imagine from your seat at Wolters Kluwer, you probably have a very different perspective to the market. And one of the things that I am wondering is do you expect to see more societies seek commercial publishers as they contend with open access, as they deal with more operating complexity internationally? What do you see as the longer term trend here?
MIRANDA WALKER: I think that there's always societies that are looking to innovate, and it's really about speed to innovation. About how quickly can they roll things out. And there are some self-published societies that have the ability to do that very well. They have the resources internally, they have the technical support to do that. And then there are some that need to come to commercial publishers, but to say that there's going to be a grand stream over, I can't make that statement right now.
MIRANDA WALKER: But I think things like events like this, I'll do my FSP plug. There are organizations that are really important to leverage best practices, because that's what commercial publishers do. We have lots of different business models. We can practice over here, and then share with this other group, with another society partner. We tried this and it worked, you might want to try it. We tried this and it didn't work, please don't try it. So there's different things that benefit that come from commercial publisher or societies, but there are other ways to get that same kind of experience.
MIRANDA WALKER:
WILL SCHWEITZER: I guess a big part of the value proposition of a savvy alliance commercial player is that we can take care of your publishing business, freeing up your time and resources and dollars to potentially innovate and do some experiments specific to your membership or within your academic community.
MIRANDA WALKER: Right, and it goes-- at Wolters Kluwer, our partnerships, we try and make them wide. It's not just about, OK, we're going to publish your journal. We recognize that we have societies and societies have unique challenges when it comes to membership, when it comes to innovations, when it comes to meetings, so we offer a lot of-- we do a lot of different-- I don't want to make a commercial, but it is what it is.
MIRANDA WALKER: But a lot of the innovation comes in how you can use maybe a resource for your meetings to benefit your publications. And a lot of those societies are coming to us saying, we need to do a better job of that, we need to do a faster job of that. And so the topic at hand is platform strategies, and a lot of it comes from how can we use our leverage, the journal platform, which typically have a lot more traffic than some of the other areas of the societies to benefit the greater good, the greater group.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And from your seat, are there things societies are asking you about now more than they were two to three years ago?
MIRANDA WALKER: I think the speed to innovation is there. I think what I mentioned before is leveraging all of the resources. A lot of societies have-- their greatest revenue sources are their meetings and their publications. And so they're saying, OK, we need to diversify our revenue stream. We need to look at other ways we can make money. And so we try and meet them there and come up with different approaches to that.
MIRANDA WALKER: Another area-- I lost my train of thought-- but really, it's just about getting that. They're seeing what another group is doing, they're seeing what their competitors are doing, and they want to do it faster. A lot of conversation around guidelines. How quickly can we-- we want to be able to update them.
MIRANDA WALKER: We also want to be able to trust the content that's being put out there. We want the people who are reading it to be able to trust the content. So it's just really about working together. Meeting the challenges of preprint servers, meeting the challenges like Rod has talked about with open access. That's really where our focus has been probably in the last couple of years.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you. So that might provide a really good segue way to ask you a question, Sean, which is you're in a really unique position as a scientist and running a custom publishing operation which you may actually want to just talk for a moment about what custom publishing is. Because I'm wondering if programs like yours provide a potential solution path for some societies.
SEAN SANDERS: Thanks, Will, and thanks very much for the invitation. Good to see you again. I'm Director of the Custom Publishing Department. That's within our office of publishing at AAAS. And we're overall a non-profit, but I see us as this little for profit bubble within the non-profit organization. So what I do is try generate revenue for AAAS so that we can carry out our programs.
SEAN SANDERS: And what custom publishing is it's essentially a commercial venture. We have sponsors who will sponsor educational content that we create. And we have right now probably 13 or 14 different products that include webinars, advertorials, booklets, posters, podcasts, videos, all sorts of multimedia content. And this department was started about 14 years ago when I came on board at Science in AAAS, and I have to give credit to Bo Moran who is currently the publisher at Science.
SEAN SANDERS: This was his idea. He brought me over from a journal that we were working at together, and he saw the opportunity for this type of publishing, and this type of content. And it was still early days and it's grown organically, but I think we've turned it into a really great program. And as everybody knows, there's been a move, particularly in the last five years, away from print advertising and towards whatever you want to call it.
SEAN SANDERS: Native content, commercial content, custom publishing. And so we've sort of ridden that wave. And we were first to market with a number of products, including video webinars from Science, which we started about 12 or 13 years ago. So I think there's a really great opportunity for societies to get into the space. There's a few things that they offer. One is a very targeted audience, and an audience that many commercial entities want to speak to.
SEAN SANDERS: So if you, say, have a society of neurologists and neuroscientists, there are plenty of commercial companies, like microscope makers, for instance, companies that make fluorescent probes, all sorts of areas that they would want to target your audience and you have that audience sitting right there. And to something that I think Miranda was talking about is these societies have a huge amount of content, and content is king.
SEAN SANDERS: And this is what I think really will bring in the eyeballs, which is what the advertisers want. So I won't go on too much about it, but I think this is the area that societies really need to focus on is what they have to offer and what solutions they can provide to both their audience and to a client who is willing to pay for speaking to that audience. And the one other thing that I will just add is that a big advantage that societies have is that they can be nimble.
SEAN SANDERS: They're small, they can try things. They're not a huge venture, like a warship that you're trying to turn. You can be much more adept at being flexible. The downside is you don't always have the money to try a lot of new things or to get into a lot of new technologies. And some of these technologies can be expensive. And we found that.
SEAN SANDERS: So there is a certain upfront cost. And that is maybe where partnering with a publisher could be a good idea. But anyway, I'll stop there.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I think there's a great parallel in the comment Miranda made, that in addition to the valuable content that societies sit on that is often very trusted and the go-to resource for their domain, societies often have that platform. And the platform, the traffic, the audience, the scale, it seems like sponsored content is one other way a society could take advantage of it, whether it's revenue purposes or even mission purposes.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Great. So let's turn to new products. Ann, you advise a lot of societies and publishers, and I just had this one fundamental question. Is it too late for some societies to be thinking about new ventures?
ANN MICHAEL: Generally, I would say no. I think what we're seeing a lot is that there are different ways to innovate. And I think historically, what societies have done is they have innovated with their core journal portfolio, or book program, or in meetings, or in some other area. They've tried to improve the user experience in those areas. They've tried to be more attuned with user needs in those areas.
ANN MICHAEL: But where we are now is we're on the cusp of a time when the next wave of product innovation might very well not be rooted in those things that have always been core to them, or there may be adjacent or tangential. And so what we're seeing the most is that the organizations that are going to be successful, or on the road to success, I should say, are those that are embracing iteration and exploration.
ANN MICHAEL: And this is very difficult. So I completely agree with what Sean said about how a society can be nimble, but I would qualify that with if their culture supports that. So culturally, it's a really big shift to go from we're going to launch a journal, we know exactly how to do that, and here's this five year business case because we actually know what happens. When we launch journals, we know when they break even. We know when they contribute back to surplus or to other activities that the society is pursuing.
ANN MICHAEL: But when you start to think about a data product, or something else that maybe isn't exactly or very similar to what you've done before, there's a period of exploration and iteration. And the waterfall idea of here's this big bang, it's going to cost x millions of dollars and let's go do it, is not only-- it's likely going to lead to a very big disappointment, and I think that that's what some of these organizations are getting their heads around now is that, OK, we need to learn, we need to say, these are the kinds of products we're interested, in we need to vet that with our customers, we need to understand what researchers need, what funders need, what whoever the audience is that you're targeting primarily.
ANN MICHAEL: And of course, there's perhaps secondary and tertiary audiences, too. What is it that they really need? What's the job they're trying to do? Can we do something to help them do that better? How do we prototype and test it? How do we revise and test it? How do we test things out for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, rather than trying to construct something for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars?
ANN MICHAEL: But the flip side of that is that the organization and its governance structure has to understand that I can't tell you just yet what you're going to get out of this incremental investment. I can't tell you until I start to see a product taking shape. But when it does, what I can tell you about that product is the risk of it being a complete flop is much lower than potentially risks of something in a new area that are done in a waterfall fashion.
ANN MICHAEL: So I don't think it's too late at all, but I do think that unless we're talking about incremental changes to existing practices, an organization really needs to embrace iteration, exploration, and needs to not just say those words, but needs to truly execute on that. They need to change the criteria whereby you would get investment. They need to devote resources, because everybody's so busy that if you just have these ideas sitting on the side, they'll never go anywhere because you're keeping the trains running on time.
ANN MICHAEL: So all of these things, definitely possible, but I think it needs to be done differently than it's been done in the past.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Please.
MIRANDA WALKER: Just want to follow on what Ann was saying is-- one of the words that I wrote down that she mentioned culture, and I think that's really huge when it comes to business models, and even adopting any new strategy or trying out anything new. And I think about in terms of how things are going to be paid-- the traditional model of subscriptions and how societies have benefited from that model so securely.
MIRANDA WALKER: I had a board partner, he used to call it the golden goose. It just keeps laying eggs, but the board has to recognize that you have to feed it. And so this model has been there, but now we're having the resource centers and the data centers that have to be purchased. Is this something that your members are going to buy? Is this something that you can add, you can charge additional for your membership to cover the cost?
MIRANDA WALKER: And if you do not have a culture of advertising already, or you have a culture of advertising that's met with a lot of resistance, because there are a lot of societies that have a lot of strong advertising programs, but every survey, you have members who will push back and say, we don't like this, and we're worried about how this is perceived, but you have to recognize that you're going to go away from that subscription model, you've got to find another way to diversify your income.
MIRANDA WALKER: And if that's advertising, that's using it to support some of these innovations, then you have to work that in, somehow.
ANN MICHAEL: Miranda, it's really interesting listening to what you're saying. One of the most fun stories I think that I have was back when I worked at Wolters Kluwer. I was at Wolters Kluwer for five years a long time ago, and it was when Wolters Kluwer was predominantly a print publisher. And my job was to move things more towards digital. And one of the biggest hurdles that I had-- and this isn't just a WK thing, this is everybody-- was that every single process, every program, every measurement of value had evolved around print.
ANN MICHAEL: So when you talked about digital, everybody would say, oh, yeah, this is probably going to be something. This looks like it's the wave of the future. This looks like the way it's going to go. But to try to get funding, the financial process demanded you come up with these big ROIs. And then what would happen is they would say, well, that's nothing compared to print, so we shouldn't do that.
ANN MICHAEL: And I think organizations learned a lot from that shift and that wave and they don't think that way anymore, but there are still some vestiges of that. So you'll run into organizations culturally that say, yes, iteration, experimentation. What's my return and when do I get it? So it's changing the conversation to understand-- and the worst part is that when most of these individuals were trained, and the people they were trained by, regardless of where they are in their stage of career, they've been told that they are not being responsible.
ANN MICHAEL: They are neglecting their fiduciary responsibility if they don't know the answer to that question. And so it's just very, very interesting to think about well, no, actually, what you really need to be measuring at this stage is what are you learning? How are you changing because of what you learned? How are you leveraging what you've learned? And then you get to the point where you say, OK, well now, here's the thing I want to do.
ANN MICHAEL: New product, new feature, maybe it's an advertising model, whatever the model is, and here's how I'm going to test it. And you incrementally get to a point where now you can say, OK, I think this is this big, it appeals to this many people, it's at around this price point, or this is the business model, and now I can give you the business plan that you so reasonably want. You just wanted it way too early for something that's brand new.
MIRANDA WALKER: And recognizing there is a cut off. That there's a period of time where I think-- the internet has kind of spoiled us all. We all think that everything is supposed to be free. And you have to really start internally within your organization, so the staff can come up with a really great idea. We'll see something that Silverchair will do, we'll be like, oh, that's so cool. We want to do that too, and then not expect Silverchair to charge for it.
MIRANDA WALKER: Because there's work that's behind it, because everyone thinks it's free. And then once we make the investment in building it out, there's an expectation, even internally, that we give this away. And we have to say, OK, if we're going to give it away, we're going to give it away until this period, and then we're going to put it behind a paywall, which is really, really scary.
ANN MICHAEL: You bring up another interesting point, too, which is the perspective of managing your products as a portfolio. So what you need to say is I've got this portfolio of products, and in order for me as a society to live and breathe and continue, I need the x amount of return on this portfolio. Some of these things are going to be higher than that. Some of these things are going to be lower than that. It could be that some of them are so low that they are nothing, because they are so core to mission that they absolutely need to be done.
ANN MICHAEL: That's OK if the portfolio has other things that compensate for that. And that's the other thing. Rather than thinking about this one product at a time, we have to think about it one product at a time, one added feature at a time, and from a whole portfolio perspective in order to stay healthy and to meet our mission desires and needs and requirements and our sustainability, and quite frankly, fiduciary stewardship responibilities.
MIRANDA WALKER: Right. Right. And the last thing I'm going to say and then I'm going to be quiet. But what I'm thinking about is the silos have to be torn down within the societies, and that's the only way to recognize that all of the digital products are part-- they all benefit the cause. They benefit the goal.
MIRANDA WALKER: If the society's goal is to save the world, the meeting is doing it their way, the publication is doing it their way, all the different groups within the organization are doing it their way, they have to come together and say, how can we do it. And recognizing that there are going to be some value adds that are measured in other ways outside of income, and then there's going to be some that maybe they can monetize-- not necessarily have to use your membership pool for that to monetize it.
MIRANDA WALKER: There are certain things, resources that can be created. So I think coming together is probably the first step. Like the portfolio. Taking down those silos, sitting down with all your organizations and saying, how are we going to meet the goal of the organization as a group?
WILL SCHWEITZER: Those are great points. And I think this is actually a good place to segue into absolutes, because we've touched on two of them for societies, which is brand and governance. And Miranda, as you guys were talking, two stats came to my mind, which is on the Silverchair platform, and with our community of publishers, a majority are just achieving digital product parity now. And by that, I mean they finally have a digital equivalent of what had been a long standing print product.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So there is still a lot of product strategy and innovation that I think needs to happen to get some of those platform and audience benefits that you were talking about, Miranda. And having been a long time publisher, it is like a hard truth to relay that getting rid of print and print distribution costs probably only saves you 25% to 30% of your overall product costs. And that, I think, is just one of our painful truth, that there's still a lot of investment in content production processes, and supporting editorial stakeholders and the peer review processes, and of course in digital technology distribution.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm coming to the perspective that information actually doesn't want to be free, it actually wants to be very expensive and well-organized. So let's talk about absolutes. I think everybody here-- and Sean, I think this was in your remarks-- has had to bring governance stakeholders or even coworkers or society partners along, and I was wondering, do you guys have any tips?
WILL SCHWEITZER: What do you see as a best practice for breaking down those silos, Miranda? Or in Sean, and helping folks-- become comfortable with probably isn't the term, it seems a little trite-- but to explore those boundaries between commercial sponsored content and what is version of record, empirical research publishing. I don't know who would like to start.
WILL SCHWEITZER:
SEAN SANDERS: I'm happy to go ahead. So one thing I wanted to say that relates to this is that my experience is that many societies, and particularly nonprofits, are fairly risk averse. And this can often get in the way of creating new products and new revenue streams. If you've been doing something the same way for 30, 40, 50 years, you don't necessarily want to change. It's working, why change now?
SEAN SANDERS: But you know, all you need to do is point out tapes and CDs, record players. They've all gone that way because commercial entities have not shifted quickly enough, and they've lost out. So I think it needs a cultural change, as we've talked about. People need to come together and recognize that the world is changing around us. I mean this generation, if anybody has kids, they do not look at paper very much anymore, and they also use digital in a very different way.
SEAN SANDERS: Email is not even used very much. It's all much more rapid communication. So I think we need to be aware of these changes, and try to be on top of them. And it's not going to change quickly, and it's a little bit mundane to say, well, yes, the youth are now using digital technology, but these things are-- it's shifting, and we need to recognize that.
SEAN SANDERS: And as you talked about, I'm one of the graying members of societies, and I've already given up trying to understand Instagram. But we need to bring in young minds and fresh blood, and people who are embedded in that to help us understand what the audience of the future is going to need. And so part of that is what we need in our societies and in our organizations is to bring in young people to bring in new ideas.
SEAN SANDERS: I think that's really important. And to listen to them and not just dismiss them. But also, part of it is attrition. As us older guys age out, the younger people will come in. And so I think it takes time. And I think any organization is going to be very resistant to a quick shift, a quick change, or trying to push things all the way to digital. So my recommendation, and this has been discussed, is be iterative.
SEAN SANDERS: Try things. I don't think you need to spend a million dollars to shift to a new type of product. You can try that for a few thousand dollars. And that's how we built our custom publishing program, it's one product at a time. We started with two products, which is advertorials and booklets. It was something we could do without changing a lot of things.
SEAN SANDERS: And then slowly but surely, we moved into the digital world, started publishing more PDFs, got even a digital e-magazine type publishing platform. So it's definitely a slow process. It takes a while. You're going to be behind the curve for a while, but it's a matter of just keeping up. You keep pushing, keep bringing new ideas, and eventually things will shift.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So Sean, if you have a new colleague who comes up to you and says, but this will destroy our brand, how do you approach that conversation?
SEAN SANDERS: So you're saying, if we bring in say, a commercial sponsor, this is going to damage our brand in some way. So I think one of the critical things that we haven't talked about is speaking to your audience, polling your audience, sending out surveys, asking them what they want and what they need. Now you need to be careful of bias amongst the people who would be answering those surveys, especially depending on how you send them out, and the type of questions that you ask, but in general, I think that's a great start.
SEAN SANDERS: And we're doing that constantly. We are checking in with our members, checking in with our users, saying, what do you think of this. Is this too commercial? Are we going in the wrong direction? And then listening to those people. Even doing focus groups can be very helpful. But internally, I think it's also a matter of just bringing in evidence from other areas.
SEAN SANDERS: And somebody mentioned right at the beginning of the program about societies talking to each other. I think that's fantastic. Speak to each other, let each other know what works and what doesn't. And that's a good way to convince your colleagues that you think things can change, things can be different. At the same time, as a consultant once said to our group, you need the Eeyores in the room.
SEAN SANDERS: You need those people who are going to say, no, the world's coming to an end, because they bring an important perspective. And we shouldn't always listen to them, but they do bring a very important message, which is-- they're cautious ones, they're the ones that say, OK, let's take a step back, let's really think about where we're going. Are we moving too quickly?
SEAN SANDERS: And it's useful to have them in the conversation.
MIRANDA WALKER: I like that. I needed to hear that today, so thank you.
ANN MICHAEL: Everybody needs a good curmudgeon.
MIRANDA WALKER: Yes, we do. I was going to remind that they are of value. One thing to add that I was-- while you were talking, you almost were getting there, and I was like, oh, as soon as he gets there, I'm muting. Let the data speak for itself. I mean, there's so much that that's telling. I look at data now, compared to when I first started in this business a long time ago, and I remember having arguments about why they should value the way the HTML presents on the website.
MIRANDA WALKER: And then it was really hard for me, because as I'm trying to explain the value, but meanwhile, the data is saying that people aren't staying, they're not looking at the full text, they're downloading the PDFs. They don't even want to look at scroll down, they just click. Now, it's the complete opposite. So from a society perspective, I was still at a society, and I had all that data from 15 years ago, I would show that data along with the data today, and say, OK, now this is why we need to be prepared, because these migrations are happening.
MIRANDA WALKER: And then it's fascinating how much energy someone will put into how a table of contents looks in a printed journal. Fascinating how many calls and how much time they spend in the design, and then you ask, well, how many copies are actually being mailed compared to how many people are seeing the website. And one of the challenges that we're seeing now is sticking power.
MIRANDA WALKER: How do we get people to stay on that website to read that article? Not be distracted, to see the ads, to get the impressions that we need for the advertising, to also see what's important to the society and to the editors. That's one thing I try and remind people, that advertising is not just about commercial sales. Sometimes, if you have an interstitial and say, oh, that's annoying, I don't want to see that.
MIRANDA WALKER: But what if it was for your meeting? So even if you don't have that. And then, in the event that it's sold, it still helping you just raising awareness of something going on in within the society that turns into a monetary win. And then by the way, here's a pharma company that wants to give you $10,000 to put their ad there, just for the month. So there's different things you can leverage.
ROD COOKSON: Right. Sorry, Will. I was just going to chime in on this, the way the culture is changing, and the sort of experimentation in the iterative processes that Sean's mentioned and Ann's mentioned. I think Miranda has mentioned, too. We're all talking about similar elements. And when you were talking before, Ann, I was remembering when I was back at Blackwell Publishing 15, 20 years ago, and doing an analysis of new journals at Blackwell.
ROD COOKSON: And there was lots of anxiety that some of the journals lost lots of money, and everyone knew a few of them made lots of money. And when we actually looked at the numbers and put them together, actually almost none of them lost money. Quite a few were just in the middle, and a few of them were fantastically successful. And the head scratcher was the ones that were really successful often weren't the ones that people expected to be really successful.
ROD COOKSON: But the whole sort of package was quite attractive and quite comforting, because most of them did fine. In small stages, we've moved into this much more interesting phase now, where the kinds of change that people are making are much more-- they're much smaller changes. They're like you're saying, Sean, about different communication media, different types of experimentation.
ROD COOKSON: And this is the frontier of what's new has become radically different, and it's happening in different places. But just one comment, observation I was going to share is with some of those iterative processes, where we are, we're finding lots of publishers are more willing to share with other publishers. There is more learning that people are happy to pass on.
ROD COOKSON: That wasn't the case 20 years ago, when I started working in this business. Everything was we have special knowledge, we don't want anyone else to have special knowledge. The community of practice I mentioned before for S2O is a fantastic sharing experience. We've been involved in things like the [INAUDIBLE] exercises on read and publish agreements. So a new business model, but they're very much different stakeholders coming together and trying to work out how do we save a bit of unproductive effort here?
ROD COOKSON: How do we get to the right answer quicker, without compromising any kind of business practices? Groups like the Society Publishers Coalition we're involved in. We're definitely in a phase where experimentation and taking, learning steps together are really important. But something that's really, really nice as a society publisher, is there are an awful lot of publishers like us who are happy to share lessons and pass on their experience.
ROD COOKSON: And we don't have to make every mistake ourselves, which given how fast things change in communication media and scholarly publishing generally is it's quite a nice thing, and a sort of very enjoyable element of the new we've moved on to.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Ann, I can't let you get away without making a comment here, because I nearly just broke out in my imitation of your voice saying, yo, dude, you don't have a product problem. You have a cultural and organizational and siloed problem. So I know you can share some perspective here.
ANN MICHAEL: So actually, it's really funny. I've been thinking back to what Miranda was saying, first about breaking down silos, and I think that this is something that everyone's known they've had to do for a really long time. And some organizations have been more successful than others at doing this. But recently, I've spent most of the year thinking about organizational design, and how things work, and how people work.
ANN MICHAEL: And one of the things, I would say, is I think if you fundamentally start to move towards collaboration and teaming, where you have shared goals, if your objectives are shared, your silos will start to deteriorate. I think most of the reason you have silos is because every silo has maybe interlocking objectives, but truly not shared goals. So they're not thinking about how they can all work together to do something.
ANN MICHAEL: They're thinking about the education group needs to do x, and the journals group needs to do y, and the meetings group needs to do z. And when you start to think about-- from the very top-- vision and mission. What are the shared goals, and then what's my part in that goal, then that's the attitude that starts to permeate the organization. And so rather than think about-- I've been listening for a long time to people talk about silos to lamenting about silos, and I think in my head, I see them with a hammer and a pick, trying to go like this, when the reality is what you want them to do is melt. You're never going to knock them down forcibly.
ANN MICHAEL: And so if you put that on the side, and think about, how do we start from the top to come up with shared goals? And if that's not something your organization is looking toward, then as an individual or as a department, to think what are shared goals? What is a goal that we can construct that helps me and my potentially siloed colleagues to think about the enterprise perspective towards a larger goal?
ANN MICHAEL: And how do we work together and start to put together your own teams? And I think that a lot of the organizations that are in our sphere are very much hierarchical command and control structure. People are used to either telling people what to do or being told what to do. And very often, creativity is either not rewarded, or in some cases, punished.
ANN MICHAEL: And I don't want to be radical. It isn't always like that. I'm talking about the extreme. But if you think about that, and if you can help people to truly collaborate around shared goals, then your silos are going to start to melt. And I think that you're going to see a lot more creativity and people are going to be a lot more willing to participate. And getting back to what Sean was saying, too.
ANN MICHAEL: Different age groups, different organizational levels. I'm on this like mission, now, to get rid of words that indicate up, down. I'll talk about distributed decision making, and it's moving decisions out to where they are best made by the people that have the most information about the objective at hand. It's not pushing them down. And I think even that language really helps people start to feel that accountability and responsibility and to participate in an enterprise perspective.
ANN MICHAEL: And that starts to melt the silos, too.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Excellent.
SEAN SANDERS: Will, if I could just add something very quickly. I completely agree with that. And I think what needs to happen coming back to the culture is it needs to be top down. The cultural change, the melting of the silos has to come from the top. It has to be something where this idea of everybody needs to be on the same page. It's very difficult to build it up from the bottom because like you say, you kind of get squashed down if you're too creative or thinking too far outside the box.
SEAN SANDERS: And I think that's sometimes difficult for societies. And I have to say, at AAAS, we have a new CEO, Sudip, and he is really wonderful at doing that, at getting the company together and on the same page. But one other thing, very quickly I wanted to say, is that I think sometimes, too often the silos see a zero sum game. So what I don't get goes to somebody else, and what somebody else doesn't get can come to me.
SEAN SANDERS: And I think that's a culture that also needs to shift, somehow.
ANN MICHAEL: I would just add to that. And not to be too radical here, but if the leadership in the organization is viewing things in that manner, you have the wrong leadership. Because they are not thinking out the enterprise. They have not gotten out of a different kind of a mentality that is not going to serve them. That old saying, what got you here isn't going to get you there. And that's a tough conversation to sit down with somebody and explain.
ANN MICHAEL: This is the enterprise perspective. We think first of the organization, and then we think of what we need-- our piece in that-- and then we work together to allocate resources, which means they may not all go to you, and that's OK. It's very difficult, but some of these hard conversations definitely have to happen. And just one comment.
ANN MICHAEL: I saw David Samson in the Q&A was saying something about effective management of society boards and committees. Absolutely. There's a lot of good examples, there. There are a lot of governance boards and committees that are either competency based, or they truly, deeply understand the environment in which we operate, and that's very, very helpful. There are others that aren't, and then there are things that are way along the spectrum.
ANN MICHAEL: And one could argue that if your board isn't as effective, then maybe it has to do with how you're communicating with them, and how you're training them, honestly. So there's that, too. So I completely agree, David. There's a lot going on there.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And some unsolicited opinion. I think when you have a non competency based board that particularly has very short tenures-- you're rotating off within a year, or maybe a two year window, if you're lucky-- it requires staff to invest a lot of time in building relationships and trust with those board members. And often, those board relationships are viewed as very transactional. We're pulling together the briefing materials that we're sending to you, we're going to meet in the room, and we'll distribute meetings afterwards.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And that isn't enough to innovate, or experiment, or change culture.
MIRANDA WALKER: Just to add that it does come down to leadership, because the right leader can communicate to the board what their role is, and how they fit in that structure, and they can say that, yeah, you're only going to be around for two years, so don't go in there telling them what to do with their publications. Instead, you can provide that level of support and interpretation of what's going on in the space without expecting that you're going to have the say so through the whole process.
MIRANDA WALKER: And if you said it going in, it's a different experience than oh, this is all you, you're the VP of publications.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Really good point, Miranda. So let's turn to audience questions. And for folks who are joining us, please feel free to put a question in the chat or put a question in the Zoom Q&A feature. Rod, I think the first question is for you, and it's asking for a bit of perspective on the Subscribe to Open model. And that is whether your journals participating in the scheme are maintaining the same level of revenue as they had before they went open.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And they shared that this was a big concern for some of their editorial stakeholders as they slowly move towards open.
ROD COOKSON: Thanks. Thanks, Will. And thanks for the question, Jennifer. Yeah, I mean we fretted a lot about that same point before we made the decision. We set revenue targets for this year. This year is still going on. It's not entirely finished, but we're expecting to end up very close to the revenue we had for last year.
ROD COOKSON: We've got some extra costs-- less extra costs-- than we feared we might have. We've saved some cost. There's definitely some print and some other things that have fallen away, similar to what you said before, Will. So we're expecting very similar revenues to last year, very similar contribution. So that's worked out reassuringly well from our perspective.
ROD COOKSON: We have lost some subscribers, moving to Subscribe to Open, same as we would lose subscribers in any year. We've organically got some new subscribers, despite the budget chaos and the pain that's out there. Knowledge Unlatched have helped us bring in subscribers, and we've definitely had subscribers come because we moved to Subscribe to Open. There's definitely librarians that have explicitly told us that.
ROD COOKSON: And one thing we were particularly pleased about was one library in Australia who did cancel a subscription which was all of our journals. So it's worth a lot of money to us. And when we explain Subscribe to Open to them, they reversed the decision. They liked the proposition. So there is a degree of-- the question you're asking is it's always unknowable.
ROD COOKSON: You look at the numbers, you talk to people, you try and get a feel for it, and there's never a definitive answer. We're pretty sure we would have had a worse year financially if we'd stayed with the previous model, and that we've done better from moving to Subscribe to Open. So you know, all the mission stuff I mentioned earlier, really is important to us. But the money part is very, very significant, too, and it's come up in the comments people have put.
ROD COOKSON: We want to be sustainable. We don't want to be open access for one year, two year, and then not be able to publish anymore. We want a model that keeps going. The position of your society, you're going to know that, your board is going to know that. But I think you're asking the right questions. It really is you need to come to a sort of appreciation of where you feel, and do you feel the library community is with you?
ROD COOKSON: Can you engage your community? And certainly all I can say is our experience has been good.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thanks for sharing that. So there's a question in the chat that is asking whether breaking down essentially product silos, so instead of having subscriptions by title, you would allow, essentially, readers to subscribe to swaths of content, or maybe even a collection. A version of Spotify for scientific research. Any thoughts on whether that is a model that could work?
MIRANDA WALKER: It does work. We have it. At WK, we have some journals and some societies that are bundled. I'm not sure if it's necessarily going to help in the silo front. I think some of the challenges from the society perspective is the flagship journal gets it all. And when you have that model, typically that's what is driving the subscription, so the marketing and the promotion is often around the flagship, and the editors of the lower tier-- I hate to say lower-- the other tier, the outer tier-- I'm learning, Ann-- they don't get appreciated, and they get very frustrated, because they feel they would do better as far as usage if they were getting more marketing.
MIRANDA WALKER: But in the end, it really comes down to can we sell the subscription? There's still a balancing act that has to happen when you have that model. It's definitely worth exploring. It benefits the other journalists since that now, you have all these institutions that have access to the journal, but is it really going to drive the usage, is the question.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you. Well, we are--
ROD COOKSON: Will, can I chime in? I know we're tight on time. I think this is one of the things we've been thinking about for a while and we've been talking to people at Silverchair about. The journals are therefore getting papers in. They're the anchor. They're what the librarians recognize. I think our aspiration in a few years time is we'd like something to go alongside the journals which are reader focused, subject focused.
ROD COOKSON: They're very much how our community thinks about subjects, and that's not necessarily where the journals sit, and serve up content a little bit differently just so it's optimized for readers, so that we're covering both ends of the input and the output equation and very much addressing that point you're talking about there, Susan.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I have a feeling we could probably continue this conversation for another hour or two, but we are at time. So first, thank you Miranda, Rod, Ann, and Sean for joining us today. For everybody who joined us live, as Stephanie mentioned, we have a really quick feedback poll that we would appreciate your response. And as Steph mentioned, this was our last platform strategies event for this year, and we're starting to pull together our plans for 2022, so please stay tuned.
WILL SCHWEITZER: But thank you all very, very much. This was a great conversation today.
SEAN SANDERS: Thanks, Will.
ROD COOKSON: Thanks, everyone.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thanks.
ANN MICHAEL: Thanks, Stephanie.
MIRANDA WALKER: Thanks, everyone. Bye.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Bye.
Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: Joining me today are Rod Cookson from IWA Publishing, Ann Michael from Delta Think, Sean Sanders from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Miranda Walker from Wolters Kluwer Health. And I'm really excited to have this panel together because I know or I've worked with everyone here and these folks have amazing perspectives and lots of ideas about what we're going to talk about today. So we're talking about the future of Society Publishing.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I've now been in the publishing industry for 20 years and before this webinar today, I had to step back and I tried to think about how Society Publishing has changed in just the past five, and I came back with two observations. At a macro level, very little has changed. There is also as much audience business model and product experimentation within society publishers as there are at big commercial publishers, and that's surprising to think about, giving the scale and financial advantages big commercial publishers can have.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And that everybody who's been talking about big structural changes to our market must be awfully patient. So we know there's a lot of structural pressures facing societies. We, I think, have been talking about aging memberships or the graying members since I joined publishing a long time ago, slower revenue growth or even revenue consolidation or contraction, shocks in the industry where COVID or Plan S where you'd think that Society, because of their scale is in a poor position to adapt than a big commercial publisher.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And all of it makes it very surprising to me that societies and folks who work for societies are still very optimistic. And they're talking about innovation and new products and offers and experimentation in ways commercial players aren't. And it is awfully inspiring. So we wanted to get this group together today to talk about the future of Society Publishing.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we're going to do it in I think four different areas. We're going to talk a bit about business models, where Rod and IWA Publishing are doing some work with Subscribe to Open. Around new audiences and new content formats, where Sean has some unique perspective working with custom publishing at AAAS Science Magazine. Around new products, where Ann has a lot of experience from her work at Delta Think and helping Societies with their forward looking strategy.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And then some absolutes. We know that there are some things that Societies hold near and dear that they won't want to change going forward. So the format is this. I'm going to tee up a question, the panelists are going to discuss it-- they should feel free to interject to ask questions of each other-- and then Stephanie and I will be reading the chat or looking at the questions you've submitted along the way, and we'll interject them as appropriate.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So I am just a facilitator or guide, I'll try to gently steer us through the areas, but essentially where we go is completely up to the panelists and those folks joining us digitally. So let's start with business models, if we can. And of course, there has been a lot of discussion and I think early success with the Subscribe to Open model, but I think has meant a lot of changes for societies and how they operate, how they structure their systems, how they engage their stakeholder community.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And Rod, if it's all right, can we start with you, and just say, do you see societies being set up for success in a Subscribe to Open model?
ROD COOKSON: Thanks, Will. Thanks for that very nice intro. And good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see so many people joining this session. Yeah, so Subscribe to Open. So IWA Publishing has switched 10 journals to open access this year with a Subscribe to Open model. And if you're not familiar with Subscribe to Open, it means keeping subscribers supporting a journal and using the revenue from the subscriptions to pay for open access.
ROD COOKSON: So there's no APCs, there's no sort of transactional costs. It's very much the system, as was it gets open access delivered immediately, and it's certainly working very well for us this year. As to your question, Will. Are societies set up well? A lot of the elements of Subscribe to Open are just the same as the previous existing subscription system.
ROD COOKSON: So if a society has their subscriptions in good order, if they start planning for the next year well in advance-- we work with Knowledge Unlatched, and they started work on 2020 renewals alongside us back in May, so they are already-- what does that make, five months-- into next year's renewal campaign. And the communication is good. The community is engaged.
ROD COOKSON: I think societies are very well set up. The piece that is perhaps trickier for societies is it's quite a paradigm shift. It's quite a big change. There's some new things in a model like Subscribe to Open, and every society needs to have a think about those components and are they at a point where they're ready to make that change? What I would say about our experience is on things like metrics, we are getting vastly higher usage.
ROD COOKSON: Usage for the subscription journals as was the S2O journals is something like 3 and 1/2 times what it was last year in the comparable months, and it's about seven times what it was the year before. So it's not quite an order of magnitude increase in two years, but it's getting on for that kind of change. We're running ahead with submissions. We're about 10% ahead of last year. Anecdotally, I think some publishers saw a dip this year after a big increase last year with COVID and the pandemic.
ROD COOKSON: But the thing we're really most interested in is the feedback we've got from the community. We're an international association. Our mission really is to serve researchers and practitioners everywhere, all countries. And we did an OK job before in Europe and North America and Australasia, perhaps Japan and China. But there were an awful lot of places we weren't being read very well.
ROD COOKSON: Our journals really are being read literally everywhere now. We've got incredibly good feedback from our community, generally. And I think one of the things that's starting to come across quite strongly from librarians is the equity component of a program like Subscribe to Open. It's a very fair way of making open access happen. I saw an article yesterday-- a preprint I've not seen before-- which is based on some of the Elsevier mirror journals, and they've been analyzing those and found that the author base for those mirror open access journals is very, very similar to the parent journals, except there are very few authors from low income countries.
ROD COOKSON: They've kind of been chopped out of the APC mirror journals. What we've found with Subscribe to Open is the opposite. It's bringing more people into the group. It's bringing a wider selection of researchers from around the world into our journals. It really is helping us deliver on mission. The logistics are very familiar. The same logistics as the subscription model. The mission alignment for us is fantastic.
ROD COOKSON: There's a big psychological change. There's a bit of a leap into the dark. That's kind of difficult. But our experience so far is it's working really well and we're really pleased with the upsides.
WILL SCHWEITZER: That's great to hear. Rod, one of the things that I've been thinking about, particularly since I've been at big commercial publishers and smaller societies, was the strength and number of relationships you have with society partners. And that's one of those things where it seems to lend itself to scale advantage, if you think about a big commercial publisher and just the sheer number of sales reps they may have, or how actively they can manage some of their sales agents or channel sales partners.
WILL SCHWEITZER: How is IWAP thinking about those library relationships or approaching them?
ROD COOKSON: Yeah. I think it's been a good discipline for us that we're spending a lot more time talking to customers and listening to customers. Sometimes they've got things to say that we don't necessarily want to hear, but I think the change of model for us has meant we need to engage those people, those librarians, those consortia, some funders a lot more than we used to. So we're having many more conversations.
ROD COOKSON: I think we're learning things that are useful to us. One sort of broader initiative I think might be worth mentioning is there is a Subscribe to Open community of practice which has formed around publishers like us moving to Subscribe to Open as a model. And there was a publisher group to start off with, but it's very rapidly become a publisher and librarian and consortia group with one or two funders involved.
ROD COOKSON: And it really has become a very good forum for working out how to solve some of the common problems, and take an element of the adversarial relationship that's sometimes used to exist with big deals, with subscriptions in the past, where it's very much who can negotiate the highest price and sort of extract terms. There's a genuine willingness in that community of practice group to come together and work out how do we actually come up with solutions which are good for both sides, which are good for everyone?
ROD COOKSON: So I wouldn't say we're anywhere near finishing that learning process. There's still quite a lot ahead of us to do, but it's been very enlightening. We are talking a lot more, spending lots more of our time engaged with those customers and those people that support our program, and I think we're finding very useful takeaways and very useful lessons that we can incorporate into the business.
ROD COOKSON: So yeah, it's been interesting. It's been educational.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Well, that's great. And I think it's something actually really unique to the publishing industry. I can't think of many parallels out there in other industries where you have, essentially, the level of collaboration between purchasers and consumers, or even cross purchasing groups that doesn't end up in some regulatory body investigation, I guess.
ROD COOKSON: Yeah. We're trying to avoid those areas.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So Miranda, I imagine from your seat at Wolters Kluwer, you probably have a very different perspective to the market. And one of the things that I am wondering is do you expect to see more societies seek commercial publishers as they contend with open access, as they deal with more operating complexity internationally? What do you see as the longer term trend here?
MIRANDA WALKER: I think that there's always societies that are looking to innovate, and it's really about speed to innovation. About how quickly can they roll things out. And there are some self-published societies that have the ability to do that very well. They have the resources internally, they have the technical support to do that. And then there are some that need to come to commercial publishers, but to say that there's going to be a grand stream over, I can't make that statement right now.
MIRANDA WALKER: But I think things like events like this, I'll do my FSP plug. There are organizations that are really important to leverage best practices, because that's what commercial publishers do. We have lots of different business models. We can practice over here, and then share with this other group, with another society partner. We tried this and it worked, you might want to try it. We tried this and it didn't work, please don't try it. So there's different things that benefit that come from commercial publisher or societies, but there are other ways to get that same kind of experience.
MIRANDA WALKER:
WILL SCHWEITZER: I guess a big part of the value proposition of a savvy alliance commercial player is that we can take care of your publishing business, freeing up your time and resources and dollars to potentially innovate and do some experiments specific to your membership or within your academic community.
MIRANDA WALKER: Right, and it goes-- at Wolters Kluwer, our partnerships, we try and make them wide. It's not just about, OK, we're going to publish your journal. We recognize that we have societies and societies have unique challenges when it comes to membership, when it comes to innovations, when it comes to meetings, so we offer a lot of-- we do a lot of different-- I don't want to make a commercial, but it is what it is.
MIRANDA WALKER: But a lot of the innovation comes in how you can use maybe a resource for your meetings to benefit your publications. And a lot of those societies are coming to us saying, we need to do a better job of that, we need to do a faster job of that. And so the topic at hand is platform strategies, and a lot of it comes from how can we use our leverage, the journal platform, which typically have a lot more traffic than some of the other areas of the societies to benefit the greater good, the greater group.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And from your seat, are there things societies are asking you about now more than they were two to three years ago?
MIRANDA WALKER: I think the speed to innovation is there. I think what I mentioned before is leveraging all of the resources. A lot of societies have-- their greatest revenue sources are their meetings and their publications. And so they're saying, OK, we need to diversify our revenue stream. We need to look at other ways we can make money. And so we try and meet them there and come up with different approaches to that.
MIRANDA WALKER: Another area-- I lost my train of thought-- but really, it's just about getting that. They're seeing what another group is doing, they're seeing what their competitors are doing, and they want to do it faster. A lot of conversation around guidelines. How quickly can we-- we want to be able to update them.
MIRANDA WALKER: We also want to be able to trust the content that's being put out there. We want the people who are reading it to be able to trust the content. So it's just really about working together. Meeting the challenges of preprint servers, meeting the challenges like Rod has talked about with open access. That's really where our focus has been probably in the last couple of years.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you. So that might provide a really good segue way to ask you a question, Sean, which is you're in a really unique position as a scientist and running a custom publishing operation which you may actually want to just talk for a moment about what custom publishing is. Because I'm wondering if programs like yours provide a potential solution path for some societies.
SEAN SANDERS: Thanks, Will, and thanks very much for the invitation. Good to see you again. I'm Director of the Custom Publishing Department. That's within our office of publishing at AAAS. And we're overall a non-profit, but I see us as this little for profit bubble within the non-profit organization. So what I do is try generate revenue for AAAS so that we can carry out our programs.
SEAN SANDERS: And what custom publishing is it's essentially a commercial venture. We have sponsors who will sponsor educational content that we create. And we have right now probably 13 or 14 different products that include webinars, advertorials, booklets, posters, podcasts, videos, all sorts of multimedia content. And this department was started about 14 years ago when I came on board at Science in AAAS, and I have to give credit to Bo Moran who is currently the publisher at Science.
SEAN SANDERS: This was his idea. He brought me over from a journal that we were working at together, and he saw the opportunity for this type of publishing, and this type of content. And it was still early days and it's grown organically, but I think we've turned it into a really great program. And as everybody knows, there's been a move, particularly in the last five years, away from print advertising and towards whatever you want to call it.
SEAN SANDERS: Native content, commercial content, custom publishing. And so we've sort of ridden that wave. And we were first to market with a number of products, including video webinars from Science, which we started about 12 or 13 years ago. So I think there's a really great opportunity for societies to get into the space. There's a few things that they offer. One is a very targeted audience, and an audience that many commercial entities want to speak to.
SEAN SANDERS: So if you, say, have a society of neurologists and neuroscientists, there are plenty of commercial companies, like microscope makers, for instance, companies that make fluorescent probes, all sorts of areas that they would want to target your audience and you have that audience sitting right there. And to something that I think Miranda was talking about is these societies have a huge amount of content, and content is king.
SEAN SANDERS: And this is what I think really will bring in the eyeballs, which is what the advertisers want. So I won't go on too much about it, but I think this is the area that societies really need to focus on is what they have to offer and what solutions they can provide to both their audience and to a client who is willing to pay for speaking to that audience. And the one other thing that I will just add is that a big advantage that societies have is that they can be nimble.
SEAN SANDERS: They're small, they can try things. They're not a huge venture, like a warship that you're trying to turn. You can be much more adept at being flexible. The downside is you don't always have the money to try a lot of new things or to get into a lot of new technologies. And some of these technologies can be expensive. And we found that.
SEAN SANDERS: So there is a certain upfront cost. And that is maybe where partnering with a publisher could be a good idea. But anyway, I'll stop there.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I think there's a great parallel in the comment Miranda made, that in addition to the valuable content that societies sit on that is often very trusted and the go-to resource for their domain, societies often have that platform. And the platform, the traffic, the audience, the scale, it seems like sponsored content is one other way a society could take advantage of it, whether it's revenue purposes or even mission purposes.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Great. So let's turn to new products. Ann, you advise a lot of societies and publishers, and I just had this one fundamental question. Is it too late for some societies to be thinking about new ventures?
ANN MICHAEL: Generally, I would say no. I think what we're seeing a lot is that there are different ways to innovate. And I think historically, what societies have done is they have innovated with their core journal portfolio, or book program, or in meetings, or in some other area. They've tried to improve the user experience in those areas. They've tried to be more attuned with user needs in those areas.
ANN MICHAEL: But where we are now is we're on the cusp of a time when the next wave of product innovation might very well not be rooted in those things that have always been core to them, or there may be adjacent or tangential. And so what we're seeing the most is that the organizations that are going to be successful, or on the road to success, I should say, are those that are embracing iteration and exploration.
ANN MICHAEL: And this is very difficult. So I completely agree with what Sean said about how a society can be nimble, but I would qualify that with if their culture supports that. So culturally, it's a really big shift to go from we're going to launch a journal, we know exactly how to do that, and here's this five year business case because we actually know what happens. When we launch journals, we know when they break even. We know when they contribute back to surplus or to other activities that the society is pursuing.
ANN MICHAEL: But when you start to think about a data product, or something else that maybe isn't exactly or very similar to what you've done before, there's a period of exploration and iteration. And the waterfall idea of here's this big bang, it's going to cost x millions of dollars and let's go do it, is not only-- it's likely going to lead to a very big disappointment, and I think that that's what some of these organizations are getting their heads around now is that, OK, we need to learn, we need to say, these are the kinds of products we're interested, in we need to vet that with our customers, we need to understand what researchers need, what funders need, what whoever the audience is that you're targeting primarily.
ANN MICHAEL: And of course, there's perhaps secondary and tertiary audiences, too. What is it that they really need? What's the job they're trying to do? Can we do something to help them do that better? How do we prototype and test it? How do we revise and test it? How do we test things out for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, rather than trying to construct something for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars?
ANN MICHAEL: But the flip side of that is that the organization and its governance structure has to understand that I can't tell you just yet what you're going to get out of this incremental investment. I can't tell you until I start to see a product taking shape. But when it does, what I can tell you about that product is the risk of it being a complete flop is much lower than potentially risks of something in a new area that are done in a waterfall fashion.
ANN MICHAEL: So I don't think it's too late at all, but I do think that unless we're talking about incremental changes to existing practices, an organization really needs to embrace iteration, exploration, and needs to not just say those words, but needs to truly execute on that. They need to change the criteria whereby you would get investment. They need to devote resources, because everybody's so busy that if you just have these ideas sitting on the side, they'll never go anywhere because you're keeping the trains running on time.
ANN MICHAEL: So all of these things, definitely possible, but I think it needs to be done differently than it's been done in the past.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Please.
MIRANDA WALKER: Just want to follow on what Ann was saying is-- one of the words that I wrote down that she mentioned culture, and I think that's really huge when it comes to business models, and even adopting any new strategy or trying out anything new. And I think about in terms of how things are going to be paid-- the traditional model of subscriptions and how societies have benefited from that model so securely.
MIRANDA WALKER: I had a board partner, he used to call it the golden goose. It just keeps laying eggs, but the board has to recognize that you have to feed it. And so this model has been there, but now we're having the resource centers and the data centers that have to be purchased. Is this something that your members are going to buy? Is this something that you can add, you can charge additional for your membership to cover the cost?
MIRANDA WALKER: And if you do not have a culture of advertising already, or you have a culture of advertising that's met with a lot of resistance, because there are a lot of societies that have a lot of strong advertising programs, but every survey, you have members who will push back and say, we don't like this, and we're worried about how this is perceived, but you have to recognize that you're going to go away from that subscription model, you've got to find another way to diversify your income.
MIRANDA WALKER: And if that's advertising, that's using it to support some of these innovations, then you have to work that in, somehow.
ANN MICHAEL: Miranda, it's really interesting listening to what you're saying. One of the most fun stories I think that I have was back when I worked at Wolters Kluwer. I was at Wolters Kluwer for five years a long time ago, and it was when Wolters Kluwer was predominantly a print publisher. And my job was to move things more towards digital. And one of the biggest hurdles that I had-- and this isn't just a WK thing, this is everybody-- was that every single process, every program, every measurement of value had evolved around print.
ANN MICHAEL: So when you talked about digital, everybody would say, oh, yeah, this is probably going to be something. This looks like it's the wave of the future. This looks like the way it's going to go. But to try to get funding, the financial process demanded you come up with these big ROIs. And then what would happen is they would say, well, that's nothing compared to print, so we shouldn't do that.
ANN MICHAEL: And I think organizations learned a lot from that shift and that wave and they don't think that way anymore, but there are still some vestiges of that. So you'll run into organizations culturally that say, yes, iteration, experimentation. What's my return and when do I get it? So it's changing the conversation to understand-- and the worst part is that when most of these individuals were trained, and the people they were trained by, regardless of where they are in their stage of career, they've been told that they are not being responsible.
ANN MICHAEL: They are neglecting their fiduciary responsibility if they don't know the answer to that question. And so it's just very, very interesting to think about well, no, actually, what you really need to be measuring at this stage is what are you learning? How are you changing because of what you learned? How are you leveraging what you've learned? And then you get to the point where you say, OK, well now, here's the thing I want to do.
ANN MICHAEL: New product, new feature, maybe it's an advertising model, whatever the model is, and here's how I'm going to test it. And you incrementally get to a point where now you can say, OK, I think this is this big, it appeals to this many people, it's at around this price point, or this is the business model, and now I can give you the business plan that you so reasonably want. You just wanted it way too early for something that's brand new.
MIRANDA WALKER: And recognizing there is a cut off. That there's a period of time where I think-- the internet has kind of spoiled us all. We all think that everything is supposed to be free. And you have to really start internally within your organization, so the staff can come up with a really great idea. We'll see something that Silverchair will do, we'll be like, oh, that's so cool. We want to do that too, and then not expect Silverchair to charge for it.
MIRANDA WALKER: Because there's work that's behind it, because everyone thinks it's free. And then once we make the investment in building it out, there's an expectation, even internally, that we give this away. And we have to say, OK, if we're going to give it away, we're going to give it away until this period, and then we're going to put it behind a paywall, which is really, really scary.
ANN MICHAEL: You bring up another interesting point, too, which is the perspective of managing your products as a portfolio. So what you need to say is I've got this portfolio of products, and in order for me as a society to live and breathe and continue, I need the x amount of return on this portfolio. Some of these things are going to be higher than that. Some of these things are going to be lower than that. It could be that some of them are so low that they are nothing, because they are so core to mission that they absolutely need to be done.
ANN MICHAEL: That's OK if the portfolio has other things that compensate for that. And that's the other thing. Rather than thinking about this one product at a time, we have to think about it one product at a time, one added feature at a time, and from a whole portfolio perspective in order to stay healthy and to meet our mission desires and needs and requirements and our sustainability, and quite frankly, fiduciary stewardship responibilities.
MIRANDA WALKER: Right. Right. And the last thing I'm going to say and then I'm going to be quiet. But what I'm thinking about is the silos have to be torn down within the societies, and that's the only way to recognize that all of the digital products are part-- they all benefit the cause. They benefit the goal.
MIRANDA WALKER: If the society's goal is to save the world, the meeting is doing it their way, the publication is doing it their way, all the different groups within the organization are doing it their way, they have to come together and say, how can we do it. And recognizing that there are going to be some value adds that are measured in other ways outside of income, and then there's going to be some that maybe they can monetize-- not necessarily have to use your membership pool for that to monetize it.
MIRANDA WALKER: There are certain things, resources that can be created. So I think coming together is probably the first step. Like the portfolio. Taking down those silos, sitting down with all your organizations and saying, how are we going to meet the goal of the organization as a group?
WILL SCHWEITZER: Those are great points. And I think this is actually a good place to segue into absolutes, because we've touched on two of them for societies, which is brand and governance. And Miranda, as you guys were talking, two stats came to my mind, which is on the Silverchair platform, and with our community of publishers, a majority are just achieving digital product parity now. And by that, I mean they finally have a digital equivalent of what had been a long standing print product.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So there is still a lot of product strategy and innovation that I think needs to happen to get some of those platform and audience benefits that you were talking about, Miranda. And having been a long time publisher, it is like a hard truth to relay that getting rid of print and print distribution costs probably only saves you 25% to 30% of your overall product costs. And that, I think, is just one of our painful truth, that there's still a lot of investment in content production processes, and supporting editorial stakeholders and the peer review processes, and of course in digital technology distribution.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm coming to the perspective that information actually doesn't want to be free, it actually wants to be very expensive and well-organized. So let's talk about absolutes. I think everybody here-- and Sean, I think this was in your remarks-- has had to bring governance stakeholders or even coworkers or society partners along, and I was wondering, do you guys have any tips?
WILL SCHWEITZER: What do you see as a best practice for breaking down those silos, Miranda? Or in Sean, and helping folks-- become comfortable with probably isn't the term, it seems a little trite-- but to explore those boundaries between commercial sponsored content and what is version of record, empirical research publishing. I don't know who would like to start.
WILL SCHWEITZER:
SEAN SANDERS: I'm happy to go ahead. So one thing I wanted to say that relates to this is that my experience is that many societies, and particularly nonprofits, are fairly risk averse. And this can often get in the way of creating new products and new revenue streams. If you've been doing something the same way for 30, 40, 50 years, you don't necessarily want to change. It's working, why change now?
SEAN SANDERS: But you know, all you need to do is point out tapes and CDs, record players. They've all gone that way because commercial entities have not shifted quickly enough, and they've lost out. So I think it needs a cultural change, as we've talked about. People need to come together and recognize that the world is changing around us. I mean this generation, if anybody has kids, they do not look at paper very much anymore, and they also use digital in a very different way.
SEAN SANDERS: Email is not even used very much. It's all much more rapid communication. So I think we need to be aware of these changes, and try to be on top of them. And it's not going to change quickly, and it's a little bit mundane to say, well, yes, the youth are now using digital technology, but these things are-- it's shifting, and we need to recognize that.
SEAN SANDERS: And as you talked about, I'm one of the graying members of societies, and I've already given up trying to understand Instagram. But we need to bring in young minds and fresh blood, and people who are embedded in that to help us understand what the audience of the future is going to need. And so part of that is what we need in our societies and in our organizations is to bring in young people to bring in new ideas.
SEAN SANDERS: I think that's really important. And to listen to them and not just dismiss them. But also, part of it is attrition. As us older guys age out, the younger people will come in. And so I think it takes time. And I think any organization is going to be very resistant to a quick shift, a quick change, or trying to push things all the way to digital. So my recommendation, and this has been discussed, is be iterative.
SEAN SANDERS: Try things. I don't think you need to spend a million dollars to shift to a new type of product. You can try that for a few thousand dollars. And that's how we built our custom publishing program, it's one product at a time. We started with two products, which is advertorials and booklets. It was something we could do without changing a lot of things.
SEAN SANDERS: And then slowly but surely, we moved into the digital world, started publishing more PDFs, got even a digital e-magazine type publishing platform. So it's definitely a slow process. It takes a while. You're going to be behind the curve for a while, but it's a matter of just keeping up. You keep pushing, keep bringing new ideas, and eventually things will shift.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So Sean, if you have a new colleague who comes up to you and says, but this will destroy our brand, how do you approach that conversation?
SEAN SANDERS: So you're saying, if we bring in say, a commercial sponsor, this is going to damage our brand in some way. So I think one of the critical things that we haven't talked about is speaking to your audience, polling your audience, sending out surveys, asking them what they want and what they need. Now you need to be careful of bias amongst the people who would be answering those surveys, especially depending on how you send them out, and the type of questions that you ask, but in general, I think that's a great start.
SEAN SANDERS: And we're doing that constantly. We are checking in with our members, checking in with our users, saying, what do you think of this. Is this too commercial? Are we going in the wrong direction? And then listening to those people. Even doing focus groups can be very helpful. But internally, I think it's also a matter of just bringing in evidence from other areas.
SEAN SANDERS: And somebody mentioned right at the beginning of the program about societies talking to each other. I think that's fantastic. Speak to each other, let each other know what works and what doesn't. And that's a good way to convince your colleagues that you think things can change, things can be different. At the same time, as a consultant once said to our group, you need the Eeyores in the room.
SEAN SANDERS: You need those people who are going to say, no, the world's coming to an end, because they bring an important perspective. And we shouldn't always listen to them, but they do bring a very important message, which is-- they're cautious ones, they're the ones that say, OK, let's take a step back, let's really think about where we're going. Are we moving too quickly?
SEAN SANDERS: And it's useful to have them in the conversation.
MIRANDA WALKER: I like that. I needed to hear that today, so thank you.
ANN MICHAEL: Everybody needs a good curmudgeon.
MIRANDA WALKER: Yes, we do. I was going to remind that they are of value. One thing to add that I was-- while you were talking, you almost were getting there, and I was like, oh, as soon as he gets there, I'm muting. Let the data speak for itself. I mean, there's so much that that's telling. I look at data now, compared to when I first started in this business a long time ago, and I remember having arguments about why they should value the way the HTML presents on the website.
MIRANDA WALKER: And then it was really hard for me, because as I'm trying to explain the value, but meanwhile, the data is saying that people aren't staying, they're not looking at the full text, they're downloading the PDFs. They don't even want to look at scroll down, they just click. Now, it's the complete opposite. So from a society perspective, I was still at a society, and I had all that data from 15 years ago, I would show that data along with the data today, and say, OK, now this is why we need to be prepared, because these migrations are happening.
MIRANDA WALKER: And then it's fascinating how much energy someone will put into how a table of contents looks in a printed journal. Fascinating how many calls and how much time they spend in the design, and then you ask, well, how many copies are actually being mailed compared to how many people are seeing the website. And one of the challenges that we're seeing now is sticking power.
MIRANDA WALKER: How do we get people to stay on that website to read that article? Not be distracted, to see the ads, to get the impressions that we need for the advertising, to also see what's important to the society and to the editors. That's one thing I try and remind people, that advertising is not just about commercial sales. Sometimes, if you have an interstitial and say, oh, that's annoying, I don't want to see that.
MIRANDA WALKER: But what if it was for your meeting? So even if you don't have that. And then, in the event that it's sold, it still helping you just raising awareness of something going on in within the society that turns into a monetary win. And then by the way, here's a pharma company that wants to give you $10,000 to put their ad there, just for the month. So there's different things you can leverage.
ROD COOKSON: Right. Sorry, Will. I was just going to chime in on this, the way the culture is changing, and the sort of experimentation in the iterative processes that Sean's mentioned and Ann's mentioned. I think Miranda has mentioned, too. We're all talking about similar elements. And when you were talking before, Ann, I was remembering when I was back at Blackwell Publishing 15, 20 years ago, and doing an analysis of new journals at Blackwell.
ROD COOKSON: And there was lots of anxiety that some of the journals lost lots of money, and everyone knew a few of them made lots of money. And when we actually looked at the numbers and put them together, actually almost none of them lost money. Quite a few were just in the middle, and a few of them were fantastically successful. And the head scratcher was the ones that were really successful often weren't the ones that people expected to be really successful.
ROD COOKSON: But the whole sort of package was quite attractive and quite comforting, because most of them did fine. In small stages, we've moved into this much more interesting phase now, where the kinds of change that people are making are much more-- they're much smaller changes. They're like you're saying, Sean, about different communication media, different types of experimentation.
ROD COOKSON: And this is the frontier of what's new has become radically different, and it's happening in different places. But just one comment, observation I was going to share is with some of those iterative processes, where we are, we're finding lots of publishers are more willing to share with other publishers. There is more learning that people are happy to pass on.
ROD COOKSON: That wasn't the case 20 years ago, when I started working in this business. Everything was we have special knowledge, we don't want anyone else to have special knowledge. The community of practice I mentioned before for S2O is a fantastic sharing experience. We've been involved in things like the [INAUDIBLE] exercises on read and publish agreements. So a new business model, but they're very much different stakeholders coming together and trying to work out how do we save a bit of unproductive effort here?
ROD COOKSON: How do we get to the right answer quicker, without compromising any kind of business practices? Groups like the Society Publishers Coalition we're involved in. We're definitely in a phase where experimentation and taking, learning steps together are really important. But something that's really, really nice as a society publisher, is there are an awful lot of publishers like us who are happy to share lessons and pass on their experience.
ROD COOKSON: And we don't have to make every mistake ourselves, which given how fast things change in communication media and scholarly publishing generally is it's quite a nice thing, and a sort of very enjoyable element of the new we've moved on to.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Ann, I can't let you get away without making a comment here, because I nearly just broke out in my imitation of your voice saying, yo, dude, you don't have a product problem. You have a cultural and organizational and siloed problem. So I know you can share some perspective here.
ANN MICHAEL: So actually, it's really funny. I've been thinking back to what Miranda was saying, first about breaking down silos, and I think that this is something that everyone's known they've had to do for a really long time. And some organizations have been more successful than others at doing this. But recently, I've spent most of the year thinking about organizational design, and how things work, and how people work.
ANN MICHAEL: And one of the things, I would say, is I think if you fundamentally start to move towards collaboration and teaming, where you have shared goals, if your objectives are shared, your silos will start to deteriorate. I think most of the reason you have silos is because every silo has maybe interlocking objectives, but truly not shared goals. So they're not thinking about how they can all work together to do something.
ANN MICHAEL: They're thinking about the education group needs to do x, and the journals group needs to do y, and the meetings group needs to do z. And when you start to think about-- from the very top-- vision and mission. What are the shared goals, and then what's my part in that goal, then that's the attitude that starts to permeate the organization. And so rather than think about-- I've been listening for a long time to people talk about silos to lamenting about silos, and I think in my head, I see them with a hammer and a pick, trying to go like this, when the reality is what you want them to do is melt. You're never going to knock them down forcibly.
ANN MICHAEL: And so if you put that on the side, and think about, how do we start from the top to come up with shared goals? And if that's not something your organization is looking toward, then as an individual or as a department, to think what are shared goals? What is a goal that we can construct that helps me and my potentially siloed colleagues to think about the enterprise perspective towards a larger goal?
ANN MICHAEL: And how do we work together and start to put together your own teams? And I think that a lot of the organizations that are in our sphere are very much hierarchical command and control structure. People are used to either telling people what to do or being told what to do. And very often, creativity is either not rewarded, or in some cases, punished.
ANN MICHAEL: And I don't want to be radical. It isn't always like that. I'm talking about the extreme. But if you think about that, and if you can help people to truly collaborate around shared goals, then your silos are going to start to melt. And I think that you're going to see a lot more creativity and people are going to be a lot more willing to participate. And getting back to what Sean was saying, too.
ANN MICHAEL: Different age groups, different organizational levels. I'm on this like mission, now, to get rid of words that indicate up, down. I'll talk about distributed decision making, and it's moving decisions out to where they are best made by the people that have the most information about the objective at hand. It's not pushing them down. And I think even that language really helps people start to feel that accountability and responsibility and to participate in an enterprise perspective.
ANN MICHAEL: And that starts to melt the silos, too.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Excellent.
SEAN SANDERS: Will, if I could just add something very quickly. I completely agree with that. And I think what needs to happen coming back to the culture is it needs to be top down. The cultural change, the melting of the silos has to come from the top. It has to be something where this idea of everybody needs to be on the same page. It's very difficult to build it up from the bottom because like you say, you kind of get squashed down if you're too creative or thinking too far outside the box.
SEAN SANDERS: And I think that's sometimes difficult for societies. And I have to say, at AAAS, we have a new CEO, Sudip, and he is really wonderful at doing that, at getting the company together and on the same page. But one other thing, very quickly I wanted to say, is that I think sometimes, too often the silos see a zero sum game. So what I don't get goes to somebody else, and what somebody else doesn't get can come to me.
SEAN SANDERS: And I think that's a culture that also needs to shift, somehow.
ANN MICHAEL: I would just add to that. And not to be too radical here, but if the leadership in the organization is viewing things in that manner, you have the wrong leadership. Because they are not thinking out the enterprise. They have not gotten out of a different kind of a mentality that is not going to serve them. That old saying, what got you here isn't going to get you there. And that's a tough conversation to sit down with somebody and explain.
ANN MICHAEL: This is the enterprise perspective. We think first of the organization, and then we think of what we need-- our piece in that-- and then we work together to allocate resources, which means they may not all go to you, and that's OK. It's very difficult, but some of these hard conversations definitely have to happen. And just one comment.
ANN MICHAEL: I saw David Samson in the Q&A was saying something about effective management of society boards and committees. Absolutely. There's a lot of good examples, there. There are a lot of governance boards and committees that are either competency based, or they truly, deeply understand the environment in which we operate, and that's very, very helpful. There are others that aren't, and then there are things that are way along the spectrum.
ANN MICHAEL: And one could argue that if your board isn't as effective, then maybe it has to do with how you're communicating with them, and how you're training them, honestly. So there's that, too. So I completely agree, David. There's a lot going on there.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And some unsolicited opinion. I think when you have a non competency based board that particularly has very short tenures-- you're rotating off within a year, or maybe a two year window, if you're lucky-- it requires staff to invest a lot of time in building relationships and trust with those board members. And often, those board relationships are viewed as very transactional. We're pulling together the briefing materials that we're sending to you, we're going to meet in the room, and we'll distribute meetings afterwards.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And that isn't enough to innovate, or experiment, or change culture.
MIRANDA WALKER: Just to add that it does come down to leadership, because the right leader can communicate to the board what their role is, and how they fit in that structure, and they can say that, yeah, you're only going to be around for two years, so don't go in there telling them what to do with their publications. Instead, you can provide that level of support and interpretation of what's going on in the space without expecting that you're going to have the say so through the whole process.
MIRANDA WALKER: And if you said it going in, it's a different experience than oh, this is all you, you're the VP of publications.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Really good point, Miranda. So let's turn to audience questions. And for folks who are joining us, please feel free to put a question in the chat or put a question in the Zoom Q&A feature. Rod, I think the first question is for you, and it's asking for a bit of perspective on the Subscribe to Open model. And that is whether your journals participating in the scheme are maintaining the same level of revenue as they had before they went open.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And they shared that this was a big concern for some of their editorial stakeholders as they slowly move towards open.
ROD COOKSON: Thanks. Thanks, Will. And thanks for the question, Jennifer. Yeah, I mean we fretted a lot about that same point before we made the decision. We set revenue targets for this year. This year is still going on. It's not entirely finished, but we're expecting to end up very close to the revenue we had for last year.
ROD COOKSON: We've got some extra costs-- less extra costs-- than we feared we might have. We've saved some cost. There's definitely some print and some other things that have fallen away, similar to what you said before, Will. So we're expecting very similar revenues to last year, very similar contribution. So that's worked out reassuringly well from our perspective.
ROD COOKSON: We have lost some subscribers, moving to Subscribe to Open, same as we would lose subscribers in any year. We've organically got some new subscribers, despite the budget chaos and the pain that's out there. Knowledge Unlatched have helped us bring in subscribers, and we've definitely had subscribers come because we moved to Subscribe to Open. There's definitely librarians that have explicitly told us that.
ROD COOKSON: And one thing we were particularly pleased about was one library in Australia who did cancel a subscription which was all of our journals. So it's worth a lot of money to us. And when we explain Subscribe to Open to them, they reversed the decision. They liked the proposition. So there is a degree of-- the question you're asking is it's always unknowable.
ROD COOKSON: You look at the numbers, you talk to people, you try and get a feel for it, and there's never a definitive answer. We're pretty sure we would have had a worse year financially if we'd stayed with the previous model, and that we've done better from moving to Subscribe to Open. So you know, all the mission stuff I mentioned earlier, really is important to us. But the money part is very, very significant, too, and it's come up in the comments people have put.
ROD COOKSON: We want to be sustainable. We don't want to be open access for one year, two year, and then not be able to publish anymore. We want a model that keeps going. The position of your society, you're going to know that, your board is going to know that. But I think you're asking the right questions. It really is you need to come to a sort of appreciation of where you feel, and do you feel the library community is with you?
ROD COOKSON: Can you engage your community? And certainly all I can say is our experience has been good.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thanks for sharing that. So there's a question in the chat that is asking whether breaking down essentially product silos, so instead of having subscriptions by title, you would allow, essentially, readers to subscribe to swaths of content, or maybe even a collection. A version of Spotify for scientific research. Any thoughts on whether that is a model that could work?
MIRANDA WALKER: It does work. We have it. At WK, we have some journals and some societies that are bundled. I'm not sure if it's necessarily going to help in the silo front. I think some of the challenges from the society perspective is the flagship journal gets it all. And when you have that model, typically that's what is driving the subscription, so the marketing and the promotion is often around the flagship, and the editors of the lower tier-- I hate to say lower-- the other tier, the outer tier-- I'm learning, Ann-- they don't get appreciated, and they get very frustrated, because they feel they would do better as far as usage if they were getting more marketing.
MIRANDA WALKER: But in the end, it really comes down to can we sell the subscription? There's still a balancing act that has to happen when you have that model. It's definitely worth exploring. It benefits the other journalists since that now, you have all these institutions that have access to the journal, but is it really going to drive the usage, is the question.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you. Well, we are--
ROD COOKSON: Will, can I chime in? I know we're tight on time. I think this is one of the things we've been thinking about for a while and we've been talking to people at Silverchair about. The journals are therefore getting papers in. They're the anchor. They're what the librarians recognize. I think our aspiration in a few years time is we'd like something to go alongside the journals which are reader focused, subject focused.
ROD COOKSON: They're very much how our community thinks about subjects, and that's not necessarily where the journals sit, and serve up content a little bit differently just so it's optimized for readers, so that we're covering both ends of the input and the output equation and very much addressing that point you're talking about there, Susan.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I have a feeling we could probably continue this conversation for another hour or two, but we are at time. So first, thank you Miranda, Rod, Ann, and Sean for joining us today. For everybody who joined us live, as Stephanie mentioned, we have a really quick feedback poll that we would appreciate your response. And as Steph mentioned, this was our last platform strategies event for this year, and we're starting to pull together our plans for 2022, so please stay tuned.
WILL SCHWEITZER: But thank you all very, very much. This was a great conversation today.
SEAN SANDERS: Thanks, Will.
ROD COOKSON: Thanks, everyone.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thanks.
ANN MICHAEL: Thanks, Stephanie.
MIRANDA WALKER: Thanks, everyone. Bye.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Bye.
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