The World is Yours: Globalization Trends in Scholarly Publishing

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The World is Yours: Globalization Trends in Scholarly Publishing

Globalization is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new trend. For decades, our world has steadily become more interconnected and, without doubt, this is a pattern that is set to continue long into the future. In scholarly publishing, this pattern is no different. But journal publishers are increasingly noting that globalization is progressively affecting every facet of the business—from editorial and production right through to financial and sales and marketing.

This is why at this year’s KGL PubFactory Virtual Series we dedicated a special session to the topic. Hosted by Kevin Lomangino, KGL’s Director of Consulting, platform customers were led through a fascinating presentation on how globalization is currently impacting scholarly publishing and how journal publishers can best position themselves to capitalize on this trend. The following highlights some of the most striking takeaways from the session.

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(Smoothly) Transitioning to New Publishing Business Models

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(Smoothly) Transitioning to New Publishing Business Models

With all the recent discussion around the US OSTP memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research, we think it’s worthwhile to take a step back to assess the current state of subscription and Open Access business models and review how we got here, before considering how to best navigate this changing landscape. The following article details the history of business model innovation in scholarly journal publishing, from a Trends Talk by KGL Consulting.

For over a hundred years, the business of publishing academic journals has been sustained by the subscription model. It was always an impeccably simple premise: institutions paid, authors authored, publishers published, readers read, institutions renewed, and repeat. The 1970s marked something of a heyday for this model - an era that is often viewed by the industry as some kind of utopia—when the scholarly publishing ecosystem seemed to thrive, with an abundance of journals entering the market, bursting library shelves, institutional agreements aplenty and high renewal rates.

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Publishing Trends: OSTP and Public Access

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Publishing Trends: OSTP and Public Access

As part of the KGL PubFactory Virtual Series, on October 6 we hosted Industry Day, a half-day online seminar of insights, discussion, and practical takeaways for the scholarly publishing community. Headlining the event was an informative discussion with KGL’s Cara Rivera and Howard Ratner of CHORUS on the implications of the recent US OSTP memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research.

Cara starts the session by reviewing what the memo says and doesn’t say, and presents excerpts from key industry stakeholders. Howard then masterfully explains potential impacts and important nuances. The recording of the 30-minute interview can be viewed here.

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Hiring an Editor-in-Chief Set to Succeed

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Hiring an Editor-in-Chief Set to Succeed

An Editor-in-Chief search is demanding, and recruiting the right candidate is vital to upholding a society’s reputation and increasing journal impact. KGL Consulting manages the recruitment process on behalf of many societies each year, helping to set journal programs on a path to even greater success. Here are a few crucial questions of an Editor-in-Chief search to consider.

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Keep Your Authors Happy

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Keep Your Authors Happy

Greater competition to attract high quality authors and new business models to increase published articles have led to a renewed focus on author satisfaction. What are journals doing to address this? KGL Consulting has identified dozens of ways to help organizations succeed. Here are a few simple ideas to get started.

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Smarter Business Intelligence for the Open Access Era

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Smarter Business Intelligence for the Open Access Era

Recap of a poster session from the SSP 2022 Annual Meeting

Recently at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, KGL PubFactory’s Director of Platform Services, Tom Beyer, together with longtime platform partner, Stuart Maxwell, COO of Scholarly iQ, presented a poster on the advanced analytics available to publishers that many are still not using for their editorial, sales, and Plan S strategies. For those that are struggling with analysis paralysis trying to identify Open Access usage or meet reporting requirements for transformative journals, we recap the highlights of the findings and discussion here.

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Trends in Peer Review: Preprints, Open, AI, and Professional Support

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Trends in Peer Review: Preprints, Open, AI, and Professional Support

A central pillar of academic publishing, peer review has always been a hotly debated, highly politicized, and controversial subject in the industry, and with good reason. While trends frequently come and go, its central premise—the requirement to have scholarly research scrutinized by fellow academics—eternally prevails. But, so do many of the challenges associated with peer review, such as the slowing down of publication, a lack of resources, poor transparency, potential bias and unfairness.

In the midst of the pandemic, the traditional peer review process was left looking tired and exposed, as a deluge of important scientific research required far more dynamic systems of approval to fast-track research and meet the needs of the global battle against COVID-19. As a result, we witnessed a rise of preprints, not to mention subsequent retractions, and an increase in paid peer reviews, as an already time-poor pool of academics found itself stretched more than ever before and demanding remuneration for the overtime.

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Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

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Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

The global publishing industry has always had a conflicted relationship with the environment. On the one hand, no single industry has done more to educate and inform the general public about environmental issues. Whether through peer reviewed research and journals, consumer magazines, news reporting, books sold in shops or loaned through libraries, pretty much everything we know about the climate crisis is down to publishing, in some shape or form.

Yet, on the flip side, the industry cannot shy away from its own impact on climate change. Hundreds of years of deforestation to serve the print publishing industry are taking its toll. In the US alone, it is estimated that 32m trees are felled every year in order to make books—25 per cent of which are sent back to publishers unsold. Throw in reliance on fossil fuels, water usage, the use of chemical dyes and solvents, and the toll of shipping and flying physical products around the world, and you’ve got yet another manufacturing industry with a resource-heavy supply chain.

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Top Five Author Pain Points

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Top Five Author Pain Points

“If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it,” wrote Charles Bukowski in his poem “So you want to be a writer?” Being an author isn’t easy. Writers experience challenges in research, struggle with expressing their thesis, and even have writer’s block at times. But even if the ideas, the story, the research, and the writing all come bursting out of a writer, the difficulties don’t end there. Once the work is written, writers must then attempt to get their work published. And, as any writer can tell you, navigating the publishing process may be even more difficult than writing in the first place.

From an author perspective, the lack of development of this process poses significant difficulties during a time when their earnings have declined dramatically—42 percent over the last decade, according to an Authors Guild survey of trade and academic writer associations. The following are some of the more significant pain points for authors that publishers can help them navigate.

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How Are Scholarly Publishers Adapting To Open Access?

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How Are Scholarly Publishers Adapting To Open Access?

Throughout the twentieth century, academic institutions had a mandate to provide full access to the peer-reviewed scholarly literature and budgets that were more or less up to the task. Scholarly societies could count on journal subscription revenues to help fund programs and activities that benefitted their organizations, members, and fields.

Now open access models are gaining attention and growing in popularity, sometimes adding to and other times threatening the steady revenues that journal publishers have counted on for years. How will this and other seismic shifts affect the journal publishing industry moving forward?

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s José Fossi Looks Back Over a Milestone Year for the PubFactory Community

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s José Fossi Looks Back Over a Milestone Year for the PubFactory Community

For many of our publishing partners and customers, 2021 was a transient year. As the industry dusted itself off from the grueling onslaught of 2020, publishers emerged with renewed optimism and a will to experiment with new technologies, models, ideas, and ways of working.

For the team at KGL PubFactory, 2021 was also a time for optimism—a year in which exciting new partnerships were forged and important developments were made, as we watched the community continue to grow and flourish. We took some time to talk to José Fossi, PubFactory co-founder and VP of Client Services, to reflect on the last year in scholarly publishing and his own professional highlights.

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Scholarly Video: a Case Study

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Scholarly Video: a Case Study

Journal of Neurosurgery Publishing Group unleashes the power of dynamic content with the Cadmore Media video player on KGL PubFactory

At the KGL PubFactory Virtual Series user group meeting this past October, we took the opportunity to delve deep and really put scholarly video under the microscope. In a session hosted by PubFactory’s Tom Beyer, we examined in detail how one journal publisher in particular was harnessing the power of video to revolutionize its approach towards traditional journal publishing, adding fresh content types into the mix and enhancing user experience for its members in the process.

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

Global Accessibility, Advanced Analytics, New Content Types, and More

In what has become an annual tradition here at KGL, we take stock at the start of the year, consult our publishing experts, and go out on a limb to try and foretell what the future holds for our industry. After two years of uncertainty in life as we know it, here are nevertheless some of the top predictions for ongoing and emerging trends that we think publishers should bear in mind as we all make our way carefully into 2022.

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL's Kelly Lake Offers Learning Insights for Scholarly Publishers

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL's Kelly Lake Offers Learning Insights for Scholarly Publishers

As the research community evolves beyond mere PDFs of journal articles and book chapters, and publishers increasingly use their digital platforms to meet the demand for new, more engaging types of content, one area that shows strong potential is delivery of learning services. Whether it’s professional development courses for practitioners, continuing education credits, or Learning Management System (LMS) integration, publishers can now offer this content in interactive formats to their users. And publishers themselves may want to up their game when it comes to training their own workforce on issues of compliance, technology, and performance. To better help our industry understand the current landscape for eLearning strategy and solutions, I asked the head of KnowledgeWorks Global Learning, Kelly Lake, to explain the methodology, technology applications, and benefits of the L&D solutions her group provides to organizations of all types.

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Knowledge Sharing: 5 Minutes with Cara Rivera, Co-founder of Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company

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Knowledge Sharing: 5 Minutes with Cara Rivera, Co-founder of Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company

Recently, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) was very excited to announce the acquisition of Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company (KWF). The addition of sister companies, KWF Consulting and KWF Editorial adds new and expanded capabilities to the KGL portfolio and nearly 100 editorial and publishing business experts to our staff of industry professionals—not the least of whom, of course, is KWF co-founder, Cara (Kaufman) Rivera.

Assuming the new role of Vice President, Consulting and Analysis, Cara joined the KGL leadership team immediately following the November 2021 acquisition where she will continue to manage the business that is known for (among many other things), publishing the annual Journal Editorial Compensation Benchmark Study. With her decades of experience running KWF and working for commercial and society publishers, I wanted to learn more about what competencies she and her team bring to KGL, exactly how they serve journal publishers, and what she sees on the horizon for our industry.

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Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead for Scholarly Publishers

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Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead for Scholarly Publishers

Highlights and Reflections from the 2021 KGL PubFactory Virtual Series

Autumn is a busy time for KGL PubFactory. Each year, as industry events start to fill the calendar, our community of customers, partners and staff gather for our user group meeting—held the past two years as the PubFactory Virtual Series. This is a rare and refreshing opportunity to bring together all the inspiring professionals we work with on both sides of the Atlantic, encouraging them to share knowledge, insights and experiences, and to explore how publishers are adopting technology to support their current needs and future goals.

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Knowledge Sharing: 5 Minutes with Merryn Smit, Senior Project Manager at KGL PubFactory

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Knowledge Sharing: 5 Minutes with Merryn Smit, Senior Project Manager at KGL PubFactory

This week begins the latest edition of the KGL PubFactory Virtual Series user group meeting, bringing the scholarly publishing community together to share lessons learned, new platform developments, and industry insights. To mark the occasion, we welcome PubFactory’s new UK-based Senior Project Manager, Merryn Smit to the team, following her time in digital content and production roles at Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis. I spoke to her recently about moving from the publisher to vendor side, challenges publishers face with digital content, and embracing change.

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Preview: KGL PubFactory Virtual Series 2021

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Preview: KGL PubFactory Virtual Series 2021

Platform Services Director, Tom Beyer gives us an idea of what to expect at this year’s user group meeting

The PubFactory online hosting platform, established in 2010, has been holding an annual customer meeting—either in-person or virtual—for many years. This eagerly anticipated event is one of the great benefits of belonging to the PubFactory community and continues under ownership of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL).

Once again, from October 13-15, over 60 scholarly publishing stakeholders will convene a three-day Virtual Series to share knowledge, hear from platform partners and industry experts, and learn the latest developments in the PubFactory roadmap during a variety of information-packed and interactive remote sessions. Recently I asked platform co-founder and technical lead, Tom Beyer what we can expect this year.

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4 Questions with Seth Parsons

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4 Questions with Seth Parsons

Seth Parsons, co-senior editor of School University Partnerships, a journal of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS,) shares what the organization has been doing in recent years to develop more diversity in the area peer review. 

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Spotlight on Our India Teams

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Spotlight on Our India Teams

The worldwide publishing industry today would not function without the experience, support and technical skills of vast content services operations in India. Publishers, in the Global North especially, rely on the production and technology expertise of an entire support industry in one of the world’s largest emerging markets.

While initiatives to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) among staff, authors, reviewers and other stakeholders have (rightfully) taken center stage in recent years at scholarly, education, and trade publishing houses in North America and Europe, they have largely focused on issues of race and gender. Not nearly as much recognition is paid to geographical inclusion or to our industry colleagues in the Global South who ensure the ultimate delivery of a large quantity of the world’s books, journals and other publications.

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