The Future for Smaller Publishers: Louise Russell's Practical Guide to Online Hosting

Louise Russell: online hosting for smaller publishers

What is online hosting and how can smaller publishers manage it effectively? Louise Russell, Director at Tutton Russell Consulting, General Manager at start-up Kudos and former COO at Publishing Technology, shared her experience with delegates at The Future for Smaller Publishers seminar.

Aggregation services (e.g. Ingenta Connect, Metapress, HighWire) have a number of advantages:

• visibility - power of the collective
• one-stop shop for librarians (access, COUNTER compliant reports, easier for library technology integration)
• consistent interface for readers
• search engine optimisation
• economies of scale - large sites providing industry standards, up-to-date services.

There are a number of considerations that may be an opportunity or a threat, depending on your circumstances. These include:

• file specifications - that can be quite prescriptive
• level of branding
• ability to customise functionality
• product roadmap - is it a good fit for your strategy?
• level of service and support.

Platform providers are online systems that can be customised to your requirements. Companies include Atypon, pub2web, HighWire, Silverchair and Semantico. Advantages include increased control and the ability to brand. You can expect a better user interface, a wider range of functionality and tool kits, integration with back office systems and customisation. Considerations include the price point which can be higher compared to off the shelf versus more custom options. You need to bear in mind the staff and resource impact internally. A product roadmap is required and think about the ownership of code.

Other alternatives include Open Source solutions such as the Open Journals System or self-hosting. These can provide a range of approaches such as building blocks, involve a roadmap driven solely by you, can provide competitive edge, but require in-house expertise and lack the power of a collective.

When you think about online hosting you need to define the core functionality that is required. Elements include content delivery, access control and e-commerce, adherence to industry standards, integration with library technology, SEO, distribution, usage statistics and reporting. Other optional additional services can include branding and end-user support. If the vendor does not offer the latter, you will need to, but be warned, this can be time consuming.

Increasingly, it is more than journals (books and journal articles). There are emerging business models and you need to consider mobile delivery, semantic enrichment and international visibility. Tailored user experience could include localised services, supporting specific workflows. Online hosting can provide more sophisticated reporting and interoperable services.

When choosing a supplier your selection criteria should include:

• Price point functionality
• Compliance with industry standards
• Digital strategy / roadmap goals
• Age of product
• Service level agreements
• Culture/compatibility.

During the selection process you should aim to crystallise immediate and medium term objectives, define requirements through market research and stakeholder feedback. You need to consider the design and user interface and put in place due diligence such as request for proposal (RFP) and through demonstrations for a robust decision making process.

Managing a transition is critical. Think about the timing of the project and when it falls in the business year so you don't clash with key activity dates. Think about URL redirects, library technology, SEO and customisations. Undertake a content audit and inventory. Think about internal and external communication. You will need to create a project team to manage the process, include stakeholder testing and manage risk through contingency planning.

As a smaller publisher, you don't necessarily have to lag behind the technology adoption curve. Geoffrey A Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm (1991, revised 1999) outlined different groups. Size does not preclude you from being an early adopter or innovator.

• Innovators 2.5%
• Early adopters 13.5%
• Early majority 34%
• Late majority 34%
• Laggards 16%

When creating a digital strategy consider the wider business goals, define your success metrics, do market research and put in place building blocks for agile, flexible solutions. Make sure you have analytics (to measure, monitor and adapt) and a release strategy for launch. Work to industry standards (e.g. COUNTER 4, FundRef, CrossMark, ORCID, NLM DTD - JATS, KBART 1.0). Look at wider industry initiatives such as CHORUS, Kudos, Projects and sipx.

Russell closed with her blueprint for undertaking online hosting: define your digital strategy, identify success metrics, measure, monitor and refine and look at operational structure. The selection of host should reflect these core principles.

The Future for Smaller Publishers: Strategic marketing

Camilla Braithwaite: strategic marketing is key

Camilla Braithwaite, Marketing Manager at TBI Communications, spoke on the power of strategic marketing at The Future for Smaller Publishers seminar this week. She urged delegates to make the most of their assets and to build on organisational strengths and advised that in order to future proof yourself, you need to put yourself in a position to adapt and seize opportunities.

Strategic marketing is how a company can position itself within the competitor environment and is the business end of marketing (not promotional) which focuses on who customers are, what their needs and problems are, and what products and services you can develop to meet these requirements.

Smaller publishers face a number of challenges including (a lack of) market share and limited resources. They have to tackle the needs of a younger generation and find a way to negotiate open access mandates and new technology. In addition, competition for resources and building brand awareness can also be tricky.

Understanding your environment is the first step
Consider competitors' activities - who are they and what are they doing? Think in terms of your customer's workflow - who competes for your attention (it's not just other publishers, non-traditional competitors need to be considered). Author awareness is key - be aware of their rights. With many new entrants volume of content has a major impact on businesses large or small so discoverability and awareness are as important as ever. As there is continuing dissatisfaction with big profits from both librarians and researchers, this presents an opportunity for smaller organisations.

SMEs have a number of key strengths
These include proximity to community base, niche knowledge, understanding, being viewed as the 'good' in publishing, and flexibility. A small publisher's greatest asset is the connection to your community. Use your grass roots approach for advocacy, use your customer connections. Many smaller publishers will have Facebook, Twitter, a blog or forums they can use and you can encourage, reward and debate with customers through these channels. A lot of publishers are taking an advocacy approach using social media (e.g. British Ecological Society and SAGE Social Science) where you can position yourself at the heart of the community.

Build your brand - make more of it
What else does your brand represent for your customers? Is it seen as relevant and useful? Can you improve its profile among a new generation of researchers? Use the external perspective of key stakeholder groups to build up your brand values - then identify gaps to work on building something stronger and more relevant for them.

Be agile and innovative
Because you are smaller you can respond to changes around you and harness creative ideas within your organisation. Innovative doesn't have to mean expensive or be about bells and whistles. Jason Hoyt, co-founder of ALPSP Publishing Innovation Award winner PeerJ, recently said that rather than being content driven, publishers need to be more technology driven. What about being customer driven? Innovation workshops are a way to help you leapfrog barriers to meet a need that customers don't know they need yet.

Good sales and marketing strategies focus on strong territories and partnerships
This will enable you to build on areas with the most potential and is a good way to get global representation. Set targets and use a dashboard to monitor, control and understand your sales pipeline. Assess where you have market penetration which can be increased with some work and use targeted sales support to help achieve that (e.g. telephone).

Think about introducing clever pricing
Model it around the size of institution and adopt tiered pricing models. Analyse current sales and model different subscribers to identify four different tiers. This works for customers, is manageable for subscription agents and can improve your sales. A key part of keeping attrition low with tiered pricing is the communications with institutions when you introduce it. Keep as transparent as possible.

The Future for Smaller Publishers: case studies from Bioscientifica and Bone & Joint Journal

Timothy Wright sets the scene for smaller publishers

Timothy Wright, Chief Executive at Edinburgh University Press, chaired the ALPSP seminar The Future for Smaller Publishers. EUP themselves are a wholly owned subsidiary of Edinburgh University with £2.6 million total turnover. Monographs are the biggest part of their business, but their journals business is vitally important. They have 39 journals with a mixture of wholly owned society and some editor-owned journals. Smaller publishers face a lot of challenges, but these can be turned into opportunities especially working with key strategic partners.

Peter Richardson is Managing Director of the British Editorial Society of Bone & Joint Surgery which owns and publishes 3 journals including The Bone & Joint Journal. He has personal experience of small and large publishers, but has concentrated on journals over the last 15 years. He opened with a quote from OUP senior editor and Scholarly Kitchen contributor David Crotty:

"The days of the small, independent publisher may be numbered due to the enormous advantages offered by economies of scale."

He counselled that some small publishers can be extremely profitable. They classify themselves as 'not for profit', but they are 'not for loss' as well! His own organisation has recently launched an open access journal and a digest journal.

Key success factors for smaller publishers include:

• business fundamentals are more important than organisation size
• focus and specialise
• unique, high quality products lead to sustainable competitive advantage
• stay close to the market through authors, subscribers, advertisers
• outsource selectively to specialist companies - reap their economies of scale
• listen, research, innovate.

Richardson reflected on the strengths of smaller publishers who can be agile and have rapid decision making which enables an innovative approach. They can give individual attention to editors and societies and have a proximity to the market. Their niche brand for a society or a journal can have real power. Staff will often have broader roles, which can lead to lower turnover and a stable, dedicated team. Weaknesses include a lack of investment. Competition from other activities in the society, consortia sales and sometimes marketing.

Is sales and marketing the achilles heel for the smaller publisher? Library consortia sales, the inability to offer a big deal can feel like insurmountable problems. The solution may be to form consortia of smaller publishers. The Independent Scholarly Publishers Group - ISPG is one example of this with 41 high impact journals from 23 HighWire publishers. Deals have been done in China, Korea, Australia, Sweden and Qatar.

Richardson feels that smaller publishers can offer a lot when publishing society-owned journals. His advice is to find out in detail what the Society wants. Make sure you talk to the right people. Do a SWOT analysis and discuss at your presentation. Offer a detailed development plan for their journal and if appropriate, suggest new products (e.g. an OA journal). Use your own society's strengths.

In his conclusion, Richardson suggested that smaller publishers should:

• Maximise the advantages of being a small organisation
• Outsource selectively to expert organisations as larger publishers also do it
• Specialise, innovate and be close to your market
• Find a solution to enable you to sell to library consortia
• Look closely at open access
• Believe that smaller publishers can complete effectively with larger ones!

Kathryn Spiller is Head of Publishing at Bioscientifica and has experience of big and small organisations having worked at Taylor & Francis. She reflected on the changes they have gone through as a small society publisher in the last couple of years. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Society for Endocrinology. When she joined, their portfolio comprised 5 research journals on behalf  of 3 societies (with the most recent launched in 1988). They produced 1 conference abstracts journal and 2 books a year sponsored by pharma. They were overstaffed (e,g. peer review contact for each journal)
with no one person dedicated to product development and little resource dedicated to sales and marketing. The publishing side brought in most of revenue for society, but wasn't structured to evolve and develop.

Kathryn Spiller, centre

The leadership team set a long term vision and short term goals. These were presented as a storyboard to the managers and that process repeated at each level. All staff were involved which inspired and motivated them. It was a (pleasant) surprise to management that the wider teams were often more ambitious with their vision than the managers and leaders.

When assessing your strengths, Spiller cautioned on the limitations of the SWOT analysis. When done in isolation strengths can be the same as your competitors, and as a result, are not USPs after all. Strengths or weaknesses can often be your opinion and not your customer's view. Opportunities don't consider what your competitors might do and if they would have an advantage. Threats can be quite general using a PESTLE model. A more useful tool for analysis is distinctive capabilities where you consider type, capability, sustainability, delivering value to customers in the future, how you might deliver that and is it distinctive?

Bioscientifica identified 3 main areas where they had distinctive capabilities:

1. Collaborations/partnerships - society brand strong, but not distinctive, partnering with others gives them distinct advantage.
2. Commitment / agility to launch new products, respond quickly to market - two staff dedicated to new product development and track record of launching products in 6 months.
3. Stability and helpfulness of staff - low staff turnover and personal service valued.

They have built on these distinctive capabilities through the following projects:

• Collaborations - ISPG: quality, high impact journals in biomedical and life sciences from not for profit, society publishers. They share costs of sales and expertise and then access consortia who wouldn't talk to them before/individually.
• They launched Endocrine Connections - an OA journal and more recently Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism Case Reports. Created and owned by Bioscientifica that is a unique business model collaborating with societies globally with 9 partner societies.

Where are they now? They have 3 year goals to double the publishing programme, have a product for everyone with an interest in endocrinology, have an integrated search for all their content. They also have clear goals and strategies for each product, a learning plan, a culture of continuous improvement and KPIs by which they measure success.