Rob Johnson, Founder and Managing Director at Research Consulting
As I write this editorial a voucher for Bookshop.org sits on my desk. Bookshop.org is an online platform with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops. Over the last few years, it has generated £3.8m for local bookshops in the UK (and more than $33 million in its home country of the US), helping them to stave off the threat posed by Amazon. Its founder, Andy Hunter, was inspired to create Bookshop.org when a board member of the American Booksellers Association, the industry’s largest trade group, said to him over dinner, “What if ecommerce was a boon for independent bookstores, instead of being their existential threat?”
I’ve ordered from Bookshop.org on several occasions over the last few years. It usually costs me a little more than buying the same books from Amazon, and they take several extra days to arrive. Classical economic theory posits that in a free market, rational consumers will gravitate towards the most efficient and cost-effective option. This leads me to ask myself, ‘Why am I willing to pay more and wait longer for the same product?’ In economic terms, I am an irrational consumer. But I want to live in a world where independent bookshops exist and choosing to buy from Bookshop.org is my way of helping to bring that about.
An existential threat
I tell this story because independent learned society publishers are facing a similar existential threat to independent bookshops. In an article by Elle Malcolmson and myself, published this week in UKSG Insights, we show that the number of independent UK society publishers fell by a third between 2015 and 2023, seven societies ceased publishing entirely, and all but the largest UK learned societies have seen their publishing revenues decline in real terms since 2015.
As we note in our paper, this decline is in many respects an unintended consequence of the transition to open access. It seems ironic that organisations whose mission is to ‘promote excellence in science for the benefit of humanity’ (to quote the Royal Society, the granddaddy of learned societies) have become collateral damage in the effort to democratise access to scientific knowledge.
This matters because the surpluses made by learned societies from their publishing operations are reinvested into the pursuit of their charitable missions, ensuring these funds stay within academia rather than disappearing into shareholders’ pockets. All of which prompts me to ask, “What if open access was a boon for learned societies, instead of being their existential threat?”
Envisioning an alternative future
To bring this scenario about would need a number of enabling conditions:
- Policymakers committed to supporting not-for-profit open access publishing for the public good.
- Funding agencies who espoused open, scholar-led publishing services.
- Societies publicly committing to transition to open access.
- Guidance and toolkits to help small and society publishers make a sustainable move towards open access.
Many of these ingredients are already in place, at least in part. Why then are so many society publishers still struggling?
One answer lies in market forces that favour scale and investment in technology. However, complacency is also a factor. Learned society publishers risk being seen as too large and established to merit special treatment, whilst simultaneously being too small to compete with the largest commercial publishers. Our study shows the threat is real, as is the potential damage to the research system if it is ignored.
Societies must also ask themselves whether they have been too quick to throw in their lot with a publishing partner instead of capitalising on what makes them unique. Over the last couple of decades, many society trustees were swayed by the offers on the table from large commercial publishers seeking to take on publication of their journals. Today, it’s by no means clear that these arrangements were always in the long-term interest of the societies in question. As the American businessman Robert Kiyosaki has said, ‘It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.’ For example, we found that 24 UK societies have ceased to publish peer-reviewed journals in their own right since 2015. Many of these have chosen to outsource their publications to a partner, but digging into the financial performance of seven societies that outsourced their publishing in both 2015 and 2023 revealed a mean decline in their publishing revenues of 30%. By contrast, of eight societies that were self-published in both 2015 and 2023, all but one were able to grow their revenues from publishing, with a mean growth figure of 12%.
Embracing irrationalism
Just as an independent bookshop cannot compete with Amazon on cost or efficiency, a learned society will struggle to compete with a major commercial publisher on volume and speed of publication. How have some independent society publishers grown their revenues faster than those publishing with a partner, without all the technical infrastructure and marketing support the latter typically brings?
Part of the answer lies in the nature of transformative agreements, which favour journals with higher volumes and lower rejection rates than traditional society titles, squeezing the revenues passed to societies by the partners. But I would suggest that another part lies in ‘irrational’ decision-making by librarians and academics. Just as I am willing to pay more and wait longer for a book because I care about the type of organisation that is selling it to me, I believe there are many researchers and librarians who look beyond simplistic metrics like impact factor or cost-per-use when deciding where to publish and what to invest in. In my experience, not-for-profit publishers tend to focus on the very real challenges faced by a small organisation seeking to engage authors, libraries and consortia around the world. However, they frequently overlook the advantages that being small, not-for-profit and mission-driven bring in the eyes of librarians, in particular. When I talk to commercial publishers, by contrast, they are in no doubt that doors will be opened to their society and university press competitors that remain firmly closed to them.
Does this mean we are going to see learned society publishers toppling the dominant commercial publishers? Of course not, just as independent bookstores will not be overtaking Amazon in book sales any time soon. While commercial publishers are here to stay, a healthy scholarly communication system needs diversity. If you’re an independent society publisher, don’t be too quick to conclude you have no place in today’s market. Societies today can access a much wider range of potential collaborators and service providers than a decade ago, including other societies and university presses whose missions and values align with their own. Indeed, our study found that partnerships between UK learned societies and commercial publishers have stagnated in recent years, while those with not-for-profit partners have blossomed. To everyone involved in scholarly communication my advice is this: consider carefully the kind of publishing system you would like to see in the future. Are the decisions you make day-to-day helping or hindering its creation?
As for me, I’m off to use my Bookshop.org voucher and wait several days to receive some expensive books. Irrational? Perhaps. But a little irrationality can go a long way towards making the world a better place.
The article “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” can be found here https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.664