Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Selecting suppliers, sales and marketing.

Helen Whitehorn

Helen Whitehorn is Director of Path Projects Ltd and advises organizations on resolving a variety of operational and strategic challenges. She outlined the following five stage framework for selecting suppliers:

1. initiation
2. discovery
3. design
4. deliver
5. sustain

Start with a high level proposal and really think about why you are outsourcing. Which processes, departments and people should be involved? Are there key timings, such as product launches to be considered? When you produce the high level stratregic document. You begin to understand whether you know your workflow and what you require.

After developing your high level proposal, you should move on to a detailed specification and preferred suppliers, get an agreement in place and outline suppliers selected, detail the delivery of work underway, and outline monitoring, control and ongoing improvement.

Lorraine Ellery

Lorraine Ellery is a sales and marketing professional with experience in the information industry. She provided an overview of what to consider when outsourcing sales and marketing. Which services do you want to outsource? If it is market research, are you interested in quantitative, qualitative, industry, market or competitor research? Do you want telemarketing, web, PR and media, social media including SEO/SEM or mailings. With sales, are you interested in direct sales representatives, trade fair representation, telesales or sales support? You can also commission consultancy on strategy, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions or strategic alliances.

Ellery outlined suggestions for best practice. These include managing expectations and ensuring you have a mutual agreement. A service level agreement is essential and it should be a professional agreement. The vendor should include a comprehensive sales and marketing plan so everyone is clear about what you want to achieve and what is to be undertaken.

It is very important from a sales agent's point of view that they have clear market feedback. This can be provided in various forms, from discussion with sales rep on the ground to monthly and pipeline reporting, that all good sales agents should provide you with. A timely response to any publisher enquiries is essential for building confidence in progress and reporting. She also suggests that you ask for references and percentages where they have been successful.

What does a sales agent expect from a publisher? An indication of budget really early on as it makes a big difference to proposal they make so it is appropriate. Marketing collateral and product information needs to be of good quality. If it doesn't meet the niche market needs, that can be part of the service that can be provided.

Share competitor information that you can that will help with the agreement. Pricing guidelines are key and include detail on pricing for different markets. The agent will be able to help with this. One model for one territory does not always translate well to another.

Consider conflicts of interest around allocation of resources, whether it is complementing or competing, and around internal communication - make sure work is agreed across the organization. Consider the compensation model. Some models are based on the value of sales, some on economies of sale,  others on commission-only models. Ellery cautioned that the latter holds more risk to the agent as it cuts off time to deliver and the lengthy sales process is not always conducive to reward (sales can come in direct to the publisher or via another sales agent). She advises a combination of fee based service with some kind of compensation model.

Ellery has tended to use formal contracts for services, but it can be as simple as an agreement to accept a proposal. The 3 Cs to bear in mind with a contract are commitment, clarity and communication.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Edward Wates reflects on the Wiley-Blackwell experience.

Edward Wates, Wiley-Blackwell

Edward Wates is Global Journal Content Director for Wiley-Blackwell. He reflected on the Wiley-Blackwell experience at the ALPSP seminar on Outsourcing, providing insights into what to consider when outsourcing and insourcing, as well as lessons he has learnt.

The wider context for outsourcing is the changing environment. We are in a period of rapid change. There is a reduction in growth, digital transformation of business, with growth in open access that means lower revenue per article. There is restructuring and reinvestment in growth and innovation. Wates believes that you need to invest in article enrichment - they want their content to do more, and they want to use it in a more interesting way.

He noted that journal contract renewals is a competitive matter, often associated with improved royalty payments to keep the business. This will be the case for all publishers. All this has an impact on the cost base, so they have a responsibility to think about this.

What can be outsourced? You have to be careful about what you do and balance what you outsource and insource. This starts with redefining core competencies. They insource content acquisition, editorial judgement, sales reach, and purchasing/specification. They outsource: technology development, 'processing activities', customer services, marketing collateral and support.

You should use a range of financial metrics including cost of sale (typesetting, PP&B), plant costs (copy editing, project management), direct expenses (overheads), and releasing funds for investment. Production insourcing at Wiley-Blackwell has an ethos of 'manage more, do less'. They focus on workflow development, specification, purchasing, training and support, relationship management and project management.

Their content strategy is now multi-channel (web, mobile, ebook and print), multi-product, user focused containing multiple combinations. They also focus on discoverability. Underpinning principles set the framework for think about how they deliver these things. Wates was clear about the need to win hearts and minds internally when outsourcing. If colleagues aren't fully on board they can undermine the work.

The benefits of outsourcing include:

• increased productivity and cost savings
• redeployment of in-house staff
• speed to market
• efficiency
• access to competencies
• access to tools.

Often, you may face a challenge at senior level, where there is lack of understanding of process and tools. This has led them to focus on tools for content management. Other areas to consider are the commoditization of production services, how vendor expertise is developing and widening, flexible approaches and ways of slicing the functions to outsource.

Perceived downsides of outsourcing have to be taken into account. These can include concerns around loss of control, quality and time zone factors. The impact of growing economies and exposure to exchange rate fluctuations, staff turnover,  as well as takeovers and company failure are also areas of concern.

And what about quality issues? It helps to pin down exactly what they are: style, language, layout, timeliness – of these, the most critical is XML. Wates also defined the 'scrutiny effect' whereby the extra attention given to outsourced work may require higher quality levels than previously existed.

In the future Wates believes that speed to market, greater consistency and further standardisation will be critical. New media and enriched content will facilitate a move away from a print-oriented way of thinking about outsourcing.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Richard Fidczuk on to onshore or offshore?

Richard Fidczuk: onshoring

Richard Fidczuk is Production Director at SAGE Publications. Constant change in both journals and books businesses means the need exists to be able to adapt processes, workflows and systems to meet changing requirements. People are needed to develop these processes, workflows and systems. Managing resources is key. They have developed an insourced approach to offshoring by establishing their Delhi office.

When done well, the benefits are clear: being able to offshore staffing for production has meant reductions of 27% per page costs. Delhi handles SAGE owned journals with society contracts handled from London, due to the complexity of relationship and potential perceived (versus real) issues. He advises not to focus on new processes that are not ready for outsourcing as they are not stable enough.

Growth has enabled them to keep staff after they have off-shored functions. But it wouldn't be large enough alone to cover all staff, so they've looked at the business to change the way they do things so in order to redeploy staff. As their business has been in a state of perpetual change, it has freed them to think about how they can adapt processes to change.

Individual production editor tasks have evolved. They now have end to end responsibility, for online as well as print, with a shift to article based production. SAGE has created a new role - Production Innovation Manager which focuses on the case for improvements to production workflows - particularly around completely new products. They coordinate implementation of changes to processes/workflows and work across departments. They have also established a Global Supplier Manager who handles the relationships with all their typesetting suppliers. Other specialist roles have focused on XML, system specialists/super users, peer review system (using fundref and crossref) and open access expertise (e.g. managing payment interface with finance dealing with licensing issues). They have also used staff to support the training of teams in the Delhi office, to build understanding of the processes that will enable them to work most efficiently.

Other areas that SAGE have successfully off-shored to Delhi include:

• marketing data specialists now based in India with analysis undertaken in London
• production and permissions clearance management for SAGE major works
• journals peer review - SAGETRACK - out to Delhi
• design, book covers and marketing materials 
• IT development.

Fidczuk's final bit of advice? They have found that people find it a lot easier to change and adapt if there are real opportunities to develop and take on new roles.

New to ALPSP - David Sommer Consulting

We are pleased to welcome David Sommer Consulting as an Associate Member of ALPSP.

Roy Kaufman on Five Considerations for Publishers Developing Open Access Business Models

Roy Kaufman is Managing Director, New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) where, since 2012, he has been responsible for expanding capabilities as the business develops new services for authors, publishers and other rights holders. Prior to CCC, Kaufman served as lead counsel for the Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., working in all areas of licensing, contracts, strategic alliances and online publishing.

Here, Roy highlights considerations publishers should take into account when developing open access models.

“CCC has been providing services around open access since 2006. Through our on-going work with publishers, authors, agents and institutions around OA, we know several things. Publishers are testing different business models to determine what will work best for their organizations. This means taking into account the needs of various stakeholders, effectively collecting fees from authors and funders, managing a whole range of licensing rules at article level, and measuring and testing. 

Five considerations for publishers to take into account when developing an open access business model include:

1. Open access doesn’t necessarily mean free
There are costs involved in publication, and these can be offset in a variety of ways including through collecting of article processing charges, licensing fees for commercial use and others.

2. There are diversified sources of revenue
Open access challenges publishers’ traditional subscription-based business models.

3. There is a new focus on both pre-publication and post-publication transactions
Streamlined transactions are required for authors at pre-publication, and clear communication of licensing options are required post-publication to ensure compliance with funder guidelines.

4. Increased role for intermediaries
The increased complexity of licensing and access requires better technology and scope for trusted, specialist industry partners to deliver an improved customer experience.

5. Measurement, measurement, measurement
As with all new or emerging business models, publishers need to measure and track the impact of pricing to help develop and improve usage and support clear reporting to authors and funding agents.

These five considerations are drawn from a white paper CCC developed earlier this year to help our publisher clients when considering open access. The full version can be downloaded here."

CCC offers ALPSP members 10% off the RightsLink suite of licensing tools. Review information about their open access solution on their website at www.copyright.com/openaccess.

Text and Data Mining: rights holder licensing tools

Text and Data Mining: international perspectives, licensing and legal aspects was a Journals Publisher Forum seminar organised in conjunction with ALPSP, the Publishers Association and STM held last week in London. This is the last in a series of posts summarising discussions.

Sarah Faulder, Chief Executive of the Publishers Licensing Society announced they are developing PLS Clear – the PLS clearing house – a central window to handle license requests that will be a rights holder search and discovery service.

Text and data mining involves access to, and usage of, articles in bulk. Researchers need to track and contact potentially hundreds of publishers for permission to mine their text. The PLS service will connect researchers to rights owners for search and discovery.

Publishers already entrust licensing their secondary rights to PLS on a non-exclusive basis. As a result PLS has built arguably the most comprehensive database in the UK of publishers and their content (by ISBN/ISSN and, in due course, by DOI). This is a natural role for PLS and the network of Reproduction Rights Organizations all over the world.

They are testing a single discovery portal through which researchers can both find the appropriate publisher(s) and route their permissions requests to the relevant person in the publishing house. The plans are for a generic clearing house. The first application is text and data mining, but it will have wider usage over time.

Text and data mining presents a technical infrastructure problem first and foremost. Licensing is a necessary means of managing access to content where the scale of access increases risk of leakage and therefore piracy, and puts an unacceptable strain on publisher platforms not designed for systematic crawling and scraping.

Carlo Scollo Lavizzari is legal advisor to STM on copyright law, policy and legal affairs. Lavizzari outlined how structuring a license is easy. Leave rhetoric aside and look to business opportunities, it is about defining the terms, what are the sources, input of content, what does the user do with that content? Where is it stored, what is done with it, can it compete or not, etc. Consider the mechanical clause on delivery mechanisms. Should also deal with the end of project – always have an exit strategy! That is the legal skeleton of a legal license.

There are calls for cooperation between those who hold content in public domain, those who hold open access content, those who hold content that is subscribed to or purchased; those who already hold a lot of purchased contents; and researchers who might want to access/mine. The question they haven’t managed to get through with any community is how to combine open access environment and copyright protected license. It is an area where he believes that licensing can provide a solution, but still trying to tackle.

John Billington works in corporate products and services at Copyright Clearance Center, who’ve been working on their Text and Data Mining Pilot Service. They have developed a pilot service that provides licensed, compliant access and retrieval of full text XML and metadata from multiple scientific publishers for the purposes of text mining.

CCC’s role is to provide an authorized means to access and retrieve published content in a standard format. The initial pilot is focused on corporate users with an access, retrieval and licensing layer. Future markets may include corporate marketing users, or academic uses.

He reflected on how it has been challenging to extract full text from different publishers and convert to a normalized format that is usable in text mining technologies. There is a lack of federation and existing tools are still difficult. They are trying to provide a one-stop shop for users and publishers that incorporate standardization, license and business model and access method that works for both sides.

He noted that a researcher wouldn’t want to be limited to what the library is subscribed to. So the tool will show them the metadata for what they aren’t subscribed to. It will filter to help them understand what they have subscribed to or not. They intend to include a purchase mechanism for full text unsubscribed articles. You will be able to download results in normalized XML format. It currently has a web interface, but they are working on an API so they systematize it.

Ed Pentz from CrossRef closed the day by outlining their latest beta application Prospect. They work on the assumption that researchers aren’t doing search or discovery – researchers will know or will have used another tool. Their service relies on DOI Content Negotiation. They are now collecting ORCID IDs for researchers. In text and data mining it is important to have a unique ID for a researcher so you can see who is doing it. They are also including funding information.

DOI content negotiation can serve as a cross-publisher API for accessing full text for TDM purposes. To make use of hits, publishers merely need to register URIs to full-text. NISO is working on a fuller specification on some metadata. They are focusing on an interim solution to at least record URIs to well known licenses. They think it will also be possible to extend to handle embargoes.

He observed that there’s potential to coordinate across initiatives, but only once each organization has individually figured out during their own trial periods. CrossRef are testing the system over the summer and will then assess if it is workable as a production system.

The ALPSP International Conference debate ‘Who is the Publisher?’

Jane Tappini from Publishing Technology will be chairing a panel session later this year at academic and scholarly publishing event the ALPSP International Conference.  

Titled “Who is the Publisher?”, the session, which takes place from 14.00 – 15.30 on Thursday 12 September will focus on the changing role of publishers in a dynamic content world and discuss the challenges facing them in their battle to stay relevant.

The panel will take a look at how skillsets are set to continue to evolve and how publishers can deal with flexibility in content and pricing mechanisms, the implications they have on rights and royalties and the impact on licensing, author relations and reader expectations. The expert panel will include some leading lights in academic and research publishing.

Ziyad Marar

Deputy Managing Director and Executive Vice President of Global Publishing at SAGE Publications, Ziyad Marar has a BSc in Psychology and a Ma in the philosophy and psychology of language. Marar is also a successful author. Having had three books published over the last decade, he has become an authority on how philosophy and psychology can create a better understanding of a modern identity as well as having extensive knowledge of SAGE’s reference works, humanities, social sciences, technology and medicine publishing programs.

Dr Timo Hannay

Managing director of Digital Science, a division of Macmillan and a spin off from the Nature Publishing Group, Dr Timo Hannay specialises in providing software and data solutions for scientists and others involved in the research process. With a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College and a DPhil in Neurophysiology from Oxford University, Hannay has worked on sophisticated data management platforms like SureChem, BioData and Symplectic. Hannay is also involved with the Science Foo Camp, co-organising the collaborative event between Nature, O’Reilly Media and Google. Bringing together between 200 and 300 leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders, the Science Foo Camp is a recurring weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration and debate.

Dr Victor Henning

Co-Founder and CEO of Mendeley, as well as Vice President for Strategy at Elsevier, Dr Victor Henning understands the role of emotion in consumer decision making, intertemporal choice and the theory of reasoned action. Holding a PhD from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, Henning has had research published in Psychology & Marketing and Culture & Society. He won the Overall Best Conference Paper Award at the AMA’s in 2005 and was granted a doctoral dissertation scholarship in 2006 by the Foundation of the German Economy. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has since gone on to join academic social network tool Mendeley with academic publisher Elsevier in the heavily discussed merger from earlier in the year.

Louise Russell

Former COO at Publishing Technology, Louise Russell held the Senior Vice President position at the company’s Scholarly Division and was Head of Client Management at Ingenta, before leaving the company earlier this year to become a Consultant. Having graduated from the University of Liverpool, Russell specialises in publishing, strategic planning and product management.

With such a high calibre of speaker on board and a fascinating topic to explore, the panel is set to be one of the ALPSP Conference’s signature events. To book your place at the conference register here and we look forward to seeing you there.