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Reimagining the Vendor-Publisher Service Relationship: The Case for Vested Publishing Services
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Reimagining the Vendor-Publisher Service Relationship: The Case for Vested Publishing Services
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Segment:0 .
Thanks, everyone. Thanks for coming. So my name is Joe bottrell. I'm managing director for new-gen knowledgeworks. I'll just tell you a little bit about who we are in a second, but this is our agenda for today. I'm going to give you a very brief introduction to nugen, and then we're going to get into talking about our concept of vested publishing, the way we've reimagined the vendor publisher relationship and some of the benefits and use cases for that.
And then we're going to get into a couple of case studies, one presented by David Parker, who will introduce himself when we get to that part. And then I'll just run through some of the pitfalls that we've seen in this kind of approach and a sum up. And then we may have a few minutes for questions at the end. So a little bit about new-gen. We're one of the largest publishing services vendors.
We're a global organization, 1400 people headquartered in Chennai in south east India, but also with delivery centers in Germany, Malaysia, which we'll talk about as part of this session in the UK and in the us. We publish somewhere around or publish somewhere around 7 million frontlist pages annually. We're also a major conversion house, so we convert about a million pages a month from different formats into XML and epub and so on.
And we've been in this business for 27 years. But today we're going to be talking about how we've reimagined the vendor publisher relationship. And that's one where we're really trying to get to a true partnering relationship. We talk a lot in RFPS and procurement about partnership, but I think often that's a cliche. Often we're paying lip service to it. Our concept of vested publishing is really trying to get to aligned goals between the vendor and the publisher.
A relationship where we can share in the rewards of the activities that we're doing, but also where we can share the risk in new ventures and new publishing activity. So what is it? We're really moving away from the concept of billing per page or per article or per hour and moving to a relationship where we are building and realizing revenue together.
The vendor and the publisher working to a common goal that involves us working to control and optimize cost and but also, as I said, to sharing revenue and building value together. Typical use cases might be a new venture. And I think David's going to be talking about that in his case study, but also maybe a new list or a publisher looking to diversify into a new area, new geographies or existing geographies that a publisher might not want to focus on anymore.
And I'll be including a case study about that shortly. And also, to be honest, organizations that might be operating at a loss or that are undervalued in some way. And an organization like new Gen with a strong balance sheet and a lot of history in the industry can come in and help optimize cost, look at new growth areas and really invest in the future of these organizations. So we've had use cases in all of these scenarios.
New ventures, open access publishers. We've helped to launch new journals in the medical sciences area, for example, open access journals where we've we've helped to launch those using our platforms, using our technology and the benefits. We help the publisher move on from this concept of very reactive procurement. I think we're stuck in a cycle of in the industry at the moment where there's a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, huge consolidation in the industry.
We're also able to use this approach to optimize workflows and delivery, working in true partnership to understand how to optimize how we're delivering content from a publisher to outsource and to offshore strategically. New Gen being a business headquartered in India, most of our people are there. Of course we're about offshoring, but in a strategic way and using onshore resource to really add value and of course managing and owning risk together.
So through relationships like this, the vested publishing relationship, we're able to share the risk and take on some skin in the game. In new publishing activity. And ultimately we're reducing or eliminating upfront investment. So we have a range of platforms at new Gen, for example, that we're able to introduce to a publisher as part of this revenue sharing arrangement and make those available with no upfront investment required on the part of the publisher.
So it can be very powerful in terms of accessing new services, new platforms and new ways of doing business. And I'm going to hand over to David now who's going to talk through just one example of that. Hi well, that was loud. Sorry I'm David Parker. I'm the publisher and founder of live places publishing.
We're a course reading publisher, so we're an academic but not a scholarly publisher. We support course reading lists, syllabus, what have you, with short books written by real people exploring the intersection of their identity or constellation of identities in place? All of our books are published in collections that are interdisciplinary in nature. For example, queer and lgbtq+ studies, black studies.
Our most recent collection we've launched is activism and social movement studies. So it's a unique sort of concept and idea. I've been in academic non scholarly publishing for 25 years. This is my second startup. I started new lines of publishing for Pearson education before that, so I seem to be inveterately trying to find new ideas to to bring to market.
We are a mission driven first publisher. I think that's partly because of the place I'm at in my life now. I really care about certain causes and certain purposes, and that's really reflected in the way we've structured live places publishing. Examples of that very, very high Royalty paid across to authors who choose not to publish open access 5% of total revenues, regardless of the form of sale or format of sale directed back to funding, open access on author opt in.
And then of course, our collection pricing to university libraries is extremely accessible. There's not a library on the planet that can't buy our collection. We make it that accessible, which of course means we're not investment friendly. When we had the original idea in the summer of 2020, we talked to many publishers, many venture capitalists, many folks about our idea, and they all said, great idea.
We don't see how you could ever make money, so we're not into it. And that was really where we stood. So it was clear to us if we were going to get live places off the ground, we had to find a different mechanism and new Jen invested. Publishing ended up being an important part of that mechanism. So it's a long runway, right?
Starting a publishing company. How many of you have been on the ground floor of either launching a list or starting a publishing imprint? Well, I've done it three times and it's horribly painful. Everyone's second guesses. You everybody questions what you're doing. Everyone tells you it won't work and that you're wasting their time and money.
You just hear it over and over again. Fortunately, we're into year three and we are actually ahead of ahead of pace. But that still means we'll do maybe $250,000 in sales this year. Right and that's not a ton of money to operate a business. So you need you need solutions like vested publishing or very deep pockets. And I don't have very deep pockets.
So we think a lot about as we entered into the partnership with new Gen about focus areas where we can add value as publishers versus cost centers. And by cost center, I don't mean that there isn't value being created there, I just mean that that it's a place where probably multiple businesses or entities could support that service for us and do it equally well. Whereas if you think about things like editorial purpose and mission recruiting authors, helping authors shape their manuscript, engaging in industry events like this, thinking about innovative ways to do open access, interlibrary loan, those are areas where it's hard to be innovative and creative and to outsource that or share that with anyone else.
Whereas the other things you see like launching a library platform, website maintenance, managing your many distribution partners or your partners in the data and infrastructure ecosystem paying Royalty. These are things that really are hard to do but can be replicated. And an example of how that's worked out for us with new-gen in in addition to the areas I just showed you is in the launch of platforms, services solutions and probably the most important solution that they've created for us is our library platform, where we're able to introduce to libraries a a platform product where they can engage with with our collection.
Of course, very little discovery is done on the the publisher's platform page, but it's an important thing for the library. New-gen worked with us to design this, worked with our customers to make sure it met their needs. And now new-gen scaling this across other publishers who can't afford necessarily maybe to go with an expensive library platform solution. So this is just one example of that.
And I really think, Joe, that is largely the end of my my case study except to make the most important point. Joe said skin in the game. It's about shared risk, shared reward. The first couple of years nobody was making any revenue, any sales to share. Now we're coming to the end of year three. We're onboarding new institutional clients at the rate of about one a week, sometimes two a week.
Some very prominent institutions are signing up for our library collection. And of course, that means money is coming in and big chunks of that that come in are going to the authors and to the collection editors and to funding open access, which is the most important chunk, in my opinion, of where money should be going. The second big chunk is going to new-gen for helping us underwrite this and for taking a big risk for a couple of years.
And then the rest is going back to me and the team to keep doing what we do, right, pushing the boundaries of interdisciplinary publishing and of course reading content. So thanks. That's nice. Thank you. Thank you, David.
And yeah, I think the library platform is a is a really good example of how new-gen is often thought of as just another production vendor providing outsourced typesetting and editorial services. But through relationships like vested, we can really take it beyond that so we can provide business process, outsourcing and offshoring. We're supporting publishers through these relationships with things like writing and issuing contracts, managing gratis copies, finance support, all that kind of thing.
So it really a relationship like this, where we get into a true vested partnership, really helps us look across the operation beyond production, beyond editorial, and get deep into where we can add value and as I said before, optimize cost. So from start up, one of the use cases to much a much larger organization. Nugent has worked with Thomson reuters since 2015.
We work with them across disciplines, across functions and across many geographies around the world. And we've developed a very close partnership with Thomson reuters, consistent with their strategy to outsource and consolidate the number of vendors that they used. Back in 2016, we entered into a vested publishing relationship with Thomson reuters to manage their entire operation in the Malaysia region.
And now nugen is supporting Thomson reuters with everything that they do in Malaysia, in Malaysia, to have a comprehensive portfolio of law titles, weekly and monthly products in law, tax and personal injury and a bespoke implementation of their westlaw online platform. When we. Agreed this relationship with Thomson reuters in Malaysia, we transferred all of their existing staff to nugen, so tr staff became new Gen staff and we manage all of that business in the Malaysia region now.
That is through a revenue share. So this typical vested arrangement that we have and we've through this relationship, managed to optimise costs significantly and grow the business in that region. For Thomson reuters, it's enabled them to continue in country publishing whilst freeing their organization to focus on other strategic priorities. It also secured their revenue in that market and it's shared significant part of the risk that they saw in operating in that region.
But of course, there are pitfalls in these relationships, in these new ways of doing business. For this to be successful, organizations really need to share their objectives, share their vision and create that shared partnership. So through unrealistic or misaligned expectations, treble can come.
You really need to make sure that you've got very strong KPI tracking and service level agreements for every part of the operation. Just because you've rented into this partnership approach doesn't mean to say you can forget all of that good stuff about procurement and there needs to be really shared ownership and value focus on on value creation. And some thought about how you might bring that relationship to a close if either party want to exit further down the line.
So in summary, the vested relationship enables publishers to share goals and ambitions with their vendors, to reimagine the relationship between the vendor and the publisher, to look for new opportunities and to review and communicate about that and really focus on taking their organization to the next level. And we found it to be a really transformative way of doing business for a variety of use cases, as we've shown, and I hope that it can help you to think about the way you deal with your vendors in a different way.
So thank you for coming to the session and we'd just like to open the floor up for any questions that you've got for me from the vendor point of view or for David. Thinking about how he's entered into this relationship with a with a with a publisher. Yeah one at the back.
You hear that? A little bit, but it'd be good. Yeah just try to understand what service your company provides. Production, what else? So we provide end to end publishing services, right from commissioning and editorial assistant support through editorial services. So content development, content authoring and then the whole production piece.
So typesetting, automated typesetting. We've got online proofing tools for journals, all of that kind of stuff, and then content distribution and dissemination as well. So we provide platforms like the library platform that David showcased, and we distribute content out through all of the, through all the aggregators as well. So we distribute from that point of view, we manage manufacturing and print services as well.
And then as kind of underlying all of that, there's these opportunities to look at some more of the business process work that goes on at publishers that can kind of soak up a lot of attention and distract people from really adding value. So, for example, we're able to support publishers with financial services, organizing their bookkeeping, managing parts of their marketing delivery.
So really end to end. Thanks for the question. Hi I have two questions, so I apologize. My first question is, do you have experience with scientific publishing? And if so, can you share some of the clients that you're currently working with in scientific publishing? Yeah, I'm happy to. Society publishing, yeah.
So we we work across the scholarly range of subjects and science is a big part of that. So we work with Wolters kluwer and aup are two of our biggest scientific publishers. We work with Taylor and Francis. Most of the university presses. So Yale, Stanford, Bristol, in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge, we we are better known probably as a humanities and social sciences publisher, better known as a books supplier.
But actually we do a lot of work for journals. So through Wolters kluwer and Lippincott Williams, we support journals for the American heart association, for example, and some of the vested, some of the vested projects that we've worked on have included launching small niche, open access journals for the for the medical sciences community. I work with the American physical society, so I'm always on the lookout for a new partner.
Excellent but you also mentioned that you are based in India and all your services are in India or off shore. Just say, do you have any do you use any us copyediting at all? Yes, we have. We have an onshore team in the us based out of Austin in Texas, and a similar team in the UK. So we do a lot of editorial project management onshore and we manage pools of copy editors, proofreaders authors all onshore.
So yeah, we're able to offer a really hybrid service across offshore and onshore. And through the vested relationship, we kind of get beyond that RFP, the publishers coming and they say they know what they want and we try and really analyze the business and understand how we can optimize cost by offshoring the right stuff, right. And keeping the some of the more value added things onshore where it makes sense to do so.
Thank you. Mike Taylor, university of Bristol. And I'm not in publishing myself, so my question is probably really stupid, but I'm still trying to understand exactly what the relationship is between U2, not U2 people, the companies. So if you, as the vendor are doing things like commissioning an editorial and author developments, then what is lived purpose press actually doing?
Good question. Right well, actually, I should probably turn around. I'm going to answer that. So at live places, we handle all of our own editorial. We do our own commissioning, right? We do our own conceptualizing of new collections. We do our own marketing, our own selling. Everything that happens after that book, production, distribution, platform, maintenance management, metadata, delivery, accounting, bookkeeping, everything else is done by new Jen.
Yeah, Jen does editorial sometimes. Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, I'll let you answer, of course, Joe, but it's. There's no such thing as a cookie cutter. Exactly yeah, there's no kind of textbook kind of answer to that. But and I think it's a really good question because we hear that a lot from people when we present this concept. What does that leave for the publisher?
But it leaves a very strong brand. It leaves a niche. It leaves a final sign off on where and what is going to be published. So, you know. We're not publishers and we don't have that strong vision about we need to go off and publish in this area of medical sciences or this area of humanities. But we recognize opportunities to deliver value faster or to optimize a business that may be struggling but is providing value in the scholarly community.
And we've we've had several use cases where we've been able to take a business that might not be here anymore if it wasn't for vested publishing. And through sometimes aggressive outsourcing and offshoring, we've been able to support that business in continuing. And continuing its good work in the scholarly publishing community. Since more and more publishers focusing on open access right now.
I mean, Europe is pushing too much. And how is it affecting the industry? How is open access affecting industry? I mean, how that that movement, I mean, open access movement affecting the industry in a good, good way or bad way? I don't know. I mean, I'm just just curious. Do you want to take that, David, as the publisher?
It's a big question. I'll let you answer. I'm from American chemical society. So yep. Going towards that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a it's a big question for this session. How how is open access publishing changing the industry?
But I think in, in the concept of vested publishing that we're talking about today. If vested in changing the relationship with the vendor can really support a publisher in pivoting towards open access because there is considerable risk in that. You know, the there is a change in the revenue model. There's a significant shift in the relationship between the author and the publisher and a considerable degree of uncertainty.
While that transition happens. So I think having a strong vested relationship between the vendor and the publisher that can support the publisher through that transition, that can be a really good way of pivoting towards open access. But I'm not sure I can answer that broader question in this session. Yeah thank you. I have two questions.
Great you presented the case study, Thomas Reuter, and how you took over their operations for everything they're doing in Malaysia, including taking on their internal staff to become your staff. Is that kind of a one off or is that something you're doing in a lot of different countries? And how many countries are you doing that in? It's a fairly extreme example. I think that's one of the reasons we chose that as a case study, because we wanted to do like a, you know, a start up and then a larger organization focused on particular geographies.
So we've done it in a relatively small number of countries. Malaysia and India being the two most significant. We've done it with a number of businesses, not just Thomson reuters, and we run operations in India for a number of academic publishers who are publishing in that market, using new-gen as a partner to do so. And they've. That's we didn't help them set up.
They've kind of pivoted their operations to us for various reasons. And usually because these are difficult markets to operate in and we have. You have considerable experience of working in those geographies. Did I answer your question? Yes thank you. And my other different question is that you're covering a lot as a as a company.
So you showed us how you can offer publishers pretty much anything they need to need to be doing. What do you think for new-gen is your biggest focus or biggest opportunity for growth moving forward? So I think technology I mean, I don't want to jump on the AI bandwagon. There's plenty of other AI sessions this week, but technology and automation are still considerable focus areas for us.
Optimizing costs. We've spoken about that a lot today through automation is a significant focus for us. And that's not just in production, that's also in editorial. So we're supporting copy editors with AI and machine learning tools, not replacing copy editors with them, but supporting them to improve throughput, improve consistency and ultimately to optimize cost.
And AI is certainly a part of that. But yeah, using technology and automation to drive value is is our focus. Thank you for the question. Yeah earlier you mentioned that maybe your case study, you mentioned distribution to librarians. What do you mean? Do you mean? Let's see for some of the journals subscription model, you you also handle subscription that.
What do you mean distribution? Yeah, absolutely. So the platform handles subscriptions and integration with existing existing library systems. The platform that we've developed supports building collections and and selling subscriptions to libraries. So it's that whole kind of end to end library, library platform.
Yeah everything that you would need in a box, almost. And we could. We could have a separate session on that. I just wanted to ask, when you talked about the partnership and you mentioned outsourcing, I wasn't sure what you mean. Do you mean that part of the partnership is nugen then? Getting other vendors involved. So could you just clarify that, please? Yeah so what I mean by that is the publishing organization outsourcing their operations to new-gen. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah and we, we use some vendors of our own like freelance copy editors and so on for SME activity. But yeah, we're really talking about outsourcing to new-gen or to any other vendor. I mean, we want to present this as an opportunity to work with existing vendors in new ways. But yeah, to outsource, but to do so through this vested. Model and to have a different kind of relationship. I just wasn't sure if there's other layers.
Yeah, no, just that. Yeah so thank you for coming. Thanks for listening to our session and enjoy the rest of the conference.
Segment:0 .
Thanks, everyone. Thanks for coming. So my name is Joe bottrell. I'm managing director for new-gen knowledgeworks. I'll just tell you a little bit about who we are in a second, but this is our agenda for today. I'm going to give you a very brief introduction to nugen, and then we're going to get into talking about our concept of vested publishing, the way we've reimagined the vendor publisher relationship and some of the benefits and use cases for that.
And then we're going to get into a couple of case studies, one presented by David Parker, who will introduce himself when we get to that part. And then I'll just run through some of the pitfalls that we've seen in this kind of approach and a sum up. And then we may have a few minutes for questions at the end. So a little bit about new-gen. We're one of the largest publishing services vendors.
We're a global organization, 1400 people headquartered in Chennai in south east India, but also with delivery centers in Germany, Malaysia, which we'll talk about as part of this session in the UK and in the us. We publish somewhere around or publish somewhere around 7 million frontlist pages annually. We're also a major conversion house, so we convert about a million pages a month from different formats into XML and epub and so on.
And we've been in this business for 27 years. But today we're going to be talking about how we've reimagined the vendor publisher relationship. And that's one where we're really trying to get to a true partnering relationship. We talk a lot in RFPS and procurement about partnership, but I think often that's a cliche. Often we're paying lip service to it. Our concept of vested publishing is really trying to get to aligned goals between the vendor and the publisher.
A relationship where we can share in the rewards of the activities that we're doing, but also where we can share the risk in new ventures and new publishing activity. So what is it? We're really moving away from the concept of billing per page or per article or per hour and moving to a relationship where we are building and realizing revenue together.
The vendor and the publisher working to a common goal that involves us working to control and optimize cost and but also, as I said, to sharing revenue and building value together. Typical use cases might be a new venture. And I think David's going to be talking about that in his case study, but also maybe a new list or a publisher looking to diversify into a new area, new geographies or existing geographies that a publisher might not want to focus on anymore.
And I'll be including a case study about that shortly. And also, to be honest, organizations that might be operating at a loss or that are undervalued in some way. And an organization like new Gen with a strong balance sheet and a lot of history in the industry can come in and help optimize cost, look at new growth areas and really invest in the future of these organizations. So we've had use cases in all of these scenarios.
New ventures, open access publishers. We've helped to launch new journals in the medical sciences area, for example, open access journals where we've we've helped to launch those using our platforms, using our technology and the benefits. We help the publisher move on from this concept of very reactive procurement. I think we're stuck in a cycle of in the industry at the moment where there's a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, huge consolidation in the industry.
We're also able to use this approach to optimize workflows and delivery, working in true partnership to understand how to optimize how we're delivering content from a publisher to outsource and to offshore strategically. New Gen being a business headquartered in India, most of our people are there. Of course we're about offshoring, but in a strategic way and using onshore resource to really add value and of course managing and owning risk together.
So through relationships like this, the vested publishing relationship, we're able to share the risk and take on some skin in the game. In new publishing activity. And ultimately we're reducing or eliminating upfront investment. So we have a range of platforms at new Gen, for example, that we're able to introduce to a publisher as part of this revenue sharing arrangement and make those available with no upfront investment required on the part of the publisher.
So it can be very powerful in terms of accessing new services, new platforms and new ways of doing business. And I'm going to hand over to David now who's going to talk through just one example of that. Hi well, that was loud. Sorry I'm David Parker. I'm the publisher and founder of live places publishing.
We're a course reading publisher, so we're an academic but not a scholarly publisher. We support course reading lists, syllabus, what have you, with short books written by real people exploring the intersection of their identity or constellation of identities in place? All of our books are published in collections that are interdisciplinary in nature. For example, queer and lgbtq+ studies, black studies.
Our most recent collection we've launched is activism and social movement studies. So it's a unique sort of concept and idea. I've been in academic non scholarly publishing for 25 years. This is my second startup. I started new lines of publishing for Pearson education before that, so I seem to be inveterately trying to find new ideas to to bring to market.
We are a mission driven first publisher. I think that's partly because of the place I'm at in my life now. I really care about certain causes and certain purposes, and that's really reflected in the way we've structured live places publishing. Examples of that very, very high Royalty paid across to authors who choose not to publish open access 5% of total revenues, regardless of the form of sale or format of sale directed back to funding, open access on author opt in.
And then of course, our collection pricing to university libraries is extremely accessible. There's not a library on the planet that can't buy our collection. We make it that accessible, which of course means we're not investment friendly. When we had the original idea in the summer of 2020, we talked to many publishers, many venture capitalists, many folks about our idea, and they all said, great idea.
We don't see how you could ever make money, so we're not into it. And that was really where we stood. So it was clear to us if we were going to get live places off the ground, we had to find a different mechanism and new Jen invested. Publishing ended up being an important part of that mechanism. So it's a long runway, right?
Starting a publishing company. How many of you have been on the ground floor of either launching a list or starting a publishing imprint? Well, I've done it three times and it's horribly painful. Everyone's second guesses. You everybody questions what you're doing. Everyone tells you it won't work and that you're wasting their time and money.
You just hear it over and over again. Fortunately, we're into year three and we are actually ahead of ahead of pace. But that still means we'll do maybe $250,000 in sales this year. Right and that's not a ton of money to operate a business. So you need you need solutions like vested publishing or very deep pockets. And I don't have very deep pockets.
So we think a lot about as we entered into the partnership with new Gen about focus areas where we can add value as publishers versus cost centers. And by cost center, I don't mean that there isn't value being created there, I just mean that that it's a place where probably multiple businesses or entities could support that service for us and do it equally well. Whereas if you think about things like editorial purpose and mission recruiting authors, helping authors shape their manuscript, engaging in industry events like this, thinking about innovative ways to do open access, interlibrary loan, those are areas where it's hard to be innovative and creative and to outsource that or share that with anyone else.
Whereas the other things you see like launching a library platform, website maintenance, managing your many distribution partners or your partners in the data and infrastructure ecosystem paying Royalty. These are things that really are hard to do but can be replicated. And an example of how that's worked out for us with new-gen in in addition to the areas I just showed you is in the launch of platforms, services solutions and probably the most important solution that they've created for us is our library platform, where we're able to introduce to libraries a a platform product where they can engage with with our collection.
Of course, very little discovery is done on the the publisher's platform page, but it's an important thing for the library. New-gen worked with us to design this, worked with our customers to make sure it met their needs. And now new-gen scaling this across other publishers who can't afford necessarily maybe to go with an expensive library platform solution. So this is just one example of that.
And I really think, Joe, that is largely the end of my my case study except to make the most important point. Joe said skin in the game. It's about shared risk, shared reward. The first couple of years nobody was making any revenue, any sales to share. Now we're coming to the end of year three. We're onboarding new institutional clients at the rate of about one a week, sometimes two a week.
Some very prominent institutions are signing up for our library collection. And of course, that means money is coming in and big chunks of that that come in are going to the authors and to the collection editors and to funding open access, which is the most important chunk, in my opinion, of where money should be going. The second big chunk is going to new-gen for helping us underwrite this and for taking a big risk for a couple of years.
And then the rest is going back to me and the team to keep doing what we do, right, pushing the boundaries of interdisciplinary publishing and of course reading content. So thanks. That's nice. Thank you. Thank you, David.
And yeah, I think the library platform is a is a really good example of how new-gen is often thought of as just another production vendor providing outsourced typesetting and editorial services. But through relationships like vested, we can really take it beyond that so we can provide business process, outsourcing and offshoring. We're supporting publishers through these relationships with things like writing and issuing contracts, managing gratis copies, finance support, all that kind of thing.
So it really a relationship like this, where we get into a true vested partnership, really helps us look across the operation beyond production, beyond editorial, and get deep into where we can add value and as I said before, optimize cost. So from start up, one of the use cases to much a much larger organization. Nugent has worked with Thomson reuters since 2015.
We work with them across disciplines, across functions and across many geographies around the world. And we've developed a very close partnership with Thomson reuters, consistent with their strategy to outsource and consolidate the number of vendors that they used. Back in 2016, we entered into a vested publishing relationship with Thomson reuters to manage their entire operation in the Malaysia region.
And now nugen is supporting Thomson reuters with everything that they do in Malaysia, in Malaysia, to have a comprehensive portfolio of law titles, weekly and monthly products in law, tax and personal injury and a bespoke implementation of their westlaw online platform. When we. Agreed this relationship with Thomson reuters in Malaysia, we transferred all of their existing staff to nugen, so tr staff became new Gen staff and we manage all of that business in the Malaysia region now.
That is through a revenue share. So this typical vested arrangement that we have and we've through this relationship, managed to optimise costs significantly and grow the business in that region. For Thomson reuters, it's enabled them to continue in country publishing whilst freeing their organization to focus on other strategic priorities. It also secured their revenue in that market and it's shared significant part of the risk that they saw in operating in that region.
But of course, there are pitfalls in these relationships, in these new ways of doing business. For this to be successful, organizations really need to share their objectives, share their vision and create that shared partnership. So through unrealistic or misaligned expectations, treble can come.
You really need to make sure that you've got very strong KPI tracking and service level agreements for every part of the operation. Just because you've rented into this partnership approach doesn't mean to say you can forget all of that good stuff about procurement and there needs to be really shared ownership and value focus on on value creation. And some thought about how you might bring that relationship to a close if either party want to exit further down the line.
So in summary, the vested relationship enables publishers to share goals and ambitions with their vendors, to reimagine the relationship between the vendor and the publisher, to look for new opportunities and to review and communicate about that and really focus on taking their organization to the next level. And we found it to be a really transformative way of doing business for a variety of use cases, as we've shown, and I hope that it can help you to think about the way you deal with your vendors in a different way.
So thank you for coming to the session and we'd just like to open the floor up for any questions that you've got for me from the vendor point of view or for David. Thinking about how he's entered into this relationship with a with a with a publisher. Yeah one at the back.
You hear that? A little bit, but it'd be good. Yeah just try to understand what service your company provides. Production, what else? So we provide end to end publishing services, right from commissioning and editorial assistant support through editorial services. So content development, content authoring and then the whole production piece.
So typesetting, automated typesetting. We've got online proofing tools for journals, all of that kind of stuff, and then content distribution and dissemination as well. So we provide platforms like the library platform that David showcased, and we distribute content out through all of the, through all the aggregators as well. So we distribute from that point of view, we manage manufacturing and print services as well.
And then as kind of underlying all of that, there's these opportunities to look at some more of the business process work that goes on at publishers that can kind of soak up a lot of attention and distract people from really adding value. So, for example, we're able to support publishers with financial services, organizing their bookkeeping, managing parts of their marketing delivery.
So really end to end. Thanks for the question. Hi I have two questions, so I apologize. My first question is, do you have experience with scientific publishing? And if so, can you share some of the clients that you're currently working with in scientific publishing? Yeah, I'm happy to. Society publishing, yeah.
So we we work across the scholarly range of subjects and science is a big part of that. So we work with Wolters kluwer and aup are two of our biggest scientific publishers. We work with Taylor and Francis. Most of the university presses. So Yale, Stanford, Bristol, in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge, we we are better known probably as a humanities and social sciences publisher, better known as a books supplier.
But actually we do a lot of work for journals. So through Wolters kluwer and Lippincott Williams, we support journals for the American heart association, for example, and some of the vested, some of the vested projects that we've worked on have included launching small niche, open access journals for the for the medical sciences community. I work with the American physical society, so I'm always on the lookout for a new partner.
Excellent but you also mentioned that you are based in India and all your services are in India or off shore. Just say, do you have any do you use any us copyediting at all? Yes, we have. We have an onshore team in the us based out of Austin in Texas, and a similar team in the UK. So we do a lot of editorial project management onshore and we manage pools of copy editors, proofreaders authors all onshore.
So yeah, we're able to offer a really hybrid service across offshore and onshore. And through the vested relationship, we kind of get beyond that RFP, the publishers coming and they say they know what they want and we try and really analyze the business and understand how we can optimize cost by offshoring the right stuff, right. And keeping the some of the more value added things onshore where it makes sense to do so.
Thank you. Mike Taylor, university of Bristol. And I'm not in publishing myself, so my question is probably really stupid, but I'm still trying to understand exactly what the relationship is between U2, not U2 people, the companies. So if you, as the vendor are doing things like commissioning an editorial and author developments, then what is lived purpose press actually doing?
Good question. Right well, actually, I should probably turn around. I'm going to answer that. So at live places, we handle all of our own editorial. We do our own commissioning, right? We do our own conceptualizing of new collections. We do our own marketing, our own selling. Everything that happens after that book, production, distribution, platform, maintenance management, metadata, delivery, accounting, bookkeeping, everything else is done by new Jen.
Yeah, Jen does editorial sometimes. Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, I'll let you answer, of course, Joe, but it's. There's no such thing as a cookie cutter. Exactly yeah, there's no kind of textbook kind of answer to that. But and I think it's a really good question because we hear that a lot from people when we present this concept. What does that leave for the publisher?
But it leaves a very strong brand. It leaves a niche. It leaves a final sign off on where and what is going to be published. So, you know. We're not publishers and we don't have that strong vision about we need to go off and publish in this area of medical sciences or this area of humanities. But we recognize opportunities to deliver value faster or to optimize a business that may be struggling but is providing value in the scholarly community.
And we've we've had several use cases where we've been able to take a business that might not be here anymore if it wasn't for vested publishing. And through sometimes aggressive outsourcing and offshoring, we've been able to support that business in continuing. And continuing its good work in the scholarly publishing community. Since more and more publishers focusing on open access right now.
I mean, Europe is pushing too much. And how is it affecting the industry? How is open access affecting industry? I mean, how that that movement, I mean, open access movement affecting the industry in a good, good way or bad way? I don't know. I mean, I'm just just curious. Do you want to take that, David, as the publisher?
It's a big question. I'll let you answer. I'm from American chemical society. So yep. Going towards that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a it's a big question for this session. How how is open access publishing changing the industry?
But I think in, in the concept of vested publishing that we're talking about today. If vested in changing the relationship with the vendor can really support a publisher in pivoting towards open access because there is considerable risk in that. You know, the there is a change in the revenue model. There's a significant shift in the relationship between the author and the publisher and a considerable degree of uncertainty.
While that transition happens. So I think having a strong vested relationship between the vendor and the publisher that can support the publisher through that transition, that can be a really good way of pivoting towards open access. But I'm not sure I can answer that broader question in this session. Yeah thank you. I have two questions.
Great you presented the case study, Thomas Reuter, and how you took over their operations for everything they're doing in Malaysia, including taking on their internal staff to become your staff. Is that kind of a one off or is that something you're doing in a lot of different countries? And how many countries are you doing that in? It's a fairly extreme example. I think that's one of the reasons we chose that as a case study, because we wanted to do like a, you know, a start up and then a larger organization focused on particular geographies.
So we've done it in a relatively small number of countries. Malaysia and India being the two most significant. We've done it with a number of businesses, not just Thomson reuters, and we run operations in India for a number of academic publishers who are publishing in that market, using new-gen as a partner to do so. And they've. That's we didn't help them set up.
They've kind of pivoted their operations to us for various reasons. And usually because these are difficult markets to operate in and we have. You have considerable experience of working in those geographies. Did I answer your question? Yes thank you. And my other different question is that you're covering a lot as a as a company.
So you showed us how you can offer publishers pretty much anything they need to need to be doing. What do you think for new-gen is your biggest focus or biggest opportunity for growth moving forward? So I think technology I mean, I don't want to jump on the AI bandwagon. There's plenty of other AI sessions this week, but technology and automation are still considerable focus areas for us.
Optimizing costs. We've spoken about that a lot today through automation is a significant focus for us. And that's not just in production, that's also in editorial. So we're supporting copy editors with AI and machine learning tools, not replacing copy editors with them, but supporting them to improve throughput, improve consistency and ultimately to optimize cost.
And AI is certainly a part of that. But yeah, using technology and automation to drive value is is our focus. Thank you for the question. Yeah earlier you mentioned that maybe your case study, you mentioned distribution to librarians. What do you mean? Do you mean? Let's see for some of the journals subscription model, you you also handle subscription that.
What do you mean distribution? Yeah, absolutely. So the platform handles subscriptions and integration with existing existing library systems. The platform that we've developed supports building collections and and selling subscriptions to libraries. So it's that whole kind of end to end library, library platform.
Yeah everything that you would need in a box, almost. And we could. We could have a separate session on that. I just wanted to ask, when you talked about the partnership and you mentioned outsourcing, I wasn't sure what you mean. Do you mean that part of the partnership is nugen then? Getting other vendors involved. So could you just clarify that, please? Yeah so what I mean by that is the publishing organization outsourcing their operations to new-gen. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah and we, we use some vendors of our own like freelance copy editors and so on for SME activity. But yeah, we're really talking about outsourcing to new-gen or to any other vendor. I mean, we want to present this as an opportunity to work with existing vendors in new ways. But yeah, to outsource, but to do so through this vested. Model and to have a different kind of relationship. I just wasn't sure if there's other layers.
Yeah, no, just that. Yeah so thank you for coming. Thanks for listening to our session and enjoy the rest of the conference.
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