reset: one society's response to the new publishing economy
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Reset: A publisher’s response to the changing economyMarybeth Manning,
Director, SPIE Digital Library Sales & Business Development
UKSG 33rd Annual Conference and Exhibition
12 April 2010
What brings me here today?For 2010, SPIE took the unusual step of rolling back institutional subscription rates for its Digital Library by 10%.
What am I going to talk about?
Brief background on SPIE and SPIE Digital Library
Reasons for and approach to SPIE’s pricing review
Lessons learned and decisions made
Community response and early assessment
Applicability to the larger scholarly publishing community?
Who is SPIE?the international society for optics and photonics A not–for–profit international society—501c3 charity founded in 1955
The Society advances emerging technologies via its interdisciplinary information exchange through scientific conferences, continuing education programs, publications, patent precedent, and career and professional growth activities
Nearly 190,000 constituents from 138 countries, 15,000 members
Supports 150 student chapters worldwide
Provides nearly $2 million US annually in both dollars and in-kind support for scholarships, grants, and other education programs around the world
Publisher of the SPIE Digital Library. Also publishes print monographs, Tutorial Texts, Field Guides, reference books, print and online magazines, and variety of open access content
What is Optics and Photonics?
Eric-can you help me out with this slide?
Photonics World Market, Forecast
What is the SPIE Digital Library?
World’s largest collection of scientific and technical research in optics and photonics
6,500 volumes of SPIE conference proceedings
7 SPIE scholarly journals
300,000+ research papers in 2010; 18,000+/year
Full coverage from 1990 – present
125 eBooks
Interdisciplinary content Micro / nanotechnology
Sensor technologies
Biomedical optics
Defense and security
Communications
Imaging
Lighting and Energy
Astronomy
•Hosted by AIP Scitation
•Archived via Portico
•COUNTER III compliant
•MARC records through OCLC
•Subscriber co-branding available
•IP authentication
•No concurrent user restrictions; unlimited downloading
•CrossRef linking
•Citation metadata for easy download
•Indexed in Scopus, Compendex, Inspec, Google Scholar, Scitopia, Chem Abstracts, and others
•Multimedia
What was our institutional business model for DL prior to 2010?
Subscription Model Pricing Model
Tiered pricing model (4 tiers)
Market segment-based
Academic: Carnegie and relevant programs
Government: Relevant FTE and programs
Corporate: Revenues and relevant FTEs
Full SPIE DL (access to everything including backfile) or Topical Collections
International team of sales agents
Originally based on print pricing
Tier 1 (large institutions) as base, with each lower tier more heavily discounted than the one above it.
Consortia pricing based on tier prices; the greater the number of member subscriptions, the higher the discounts.
Regional and country discounts keyed to World Bank and UN HDI economic data
Free or low-cost access to most INASP/PERI and eJDS participating countries
Plenty of positivesBut also nagging
concerns
33% growth in subscriptions from 2008-2009
99% renewal rate
90% of researchers rated SPIE DL as good or excellent
83% would recommend SPIE DL to colleagues
Complex model
Anecdotal evidence that pricing was high relative to the competition and perceived value in some parts of the world
Suboptimal penetration into some target market segments
We felt we could not dismiss or minimize the economic realities facing current and prospective subscribers
What prompted us to re-assess SPIE DL’s pricing?
Was there a better way to do it?
Objective Goals
To develop a sustainable pricing strategy that (1) increases global access to
SPIE content and (2) supports the research
community
Achieve an optimal balance of reach and revenues
Situation Analysis Field Research
Editorial Content
Subscription model
Pricing
Cost-per-download
Circulation
Revenues
Market size analysis
Competitive landscape analysis
Researcher User surveys
Librarian and customer input—both subscribers and non-subscribers who had expressed interest but not purchased
Sales agent feedback
What did we do to identify and evaluate our alternatives?
Tiered model understood and acceptable, but
Smaller institutions or larger institutions with smaller or fewer relevant programs need tiering consideration
Corporations prefer pricing based on usage (maybe 2011)
Cost/use for low tiers might be too high
Cost/download increasing important metric
Sales agents and librarians desired room for negotiation
Promotional discounting appealed to market
Topical Collection subscriptions were growing at a faster rate than the full digital library
Market penetration low in some market segments and some price tiers
What did we learn, relevant to our objective?
What environmental factors were at play?
Flexible pricing that offers customers real options, including the ability to reduce expenditures without disproportionate loss of content, will be the most successful;
It is in the best interest of both publishers and consortia to seek creative solutions that allow licenses to remain intact as long as possible, without major content or access reductions.
Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Consortial LicensesJanuary 19, 2009
Statement on the Global Economic Crisis February 19, 2009
Acknowledging the value in chargingless, what alternatives did we have?
A
B
C
Lower prices: long-term strategic solution
Discount prices: situationalflexibility
Freeze prices: short-term response to economy
Process Implementation
Discussions with executive management
Financial scenarios and impact projections
10% reduction on subscriptions to full SPIE DL and Topical Collections
New pricing fixed for three years with three-year license commitment
Not applicable to already-discounted consortia arrangements although prices for 2010 were frozen at 2009 levels
Tier revisions: addition of 5th tier and redefinition of tier categories and pricing
How did we lower our prices?
Ultimately, why did we change?To respond proactively to the clear message from the librarian community about the financial pressures facing libraries
To better enable smaller organizations and larger institutions with fewer or smaller relevant programs to gain access
Tier revisions
Added a 5th tier
Accommodations made for for smaller organizations and larger organizations with limited engineering programs or specialized needs
Allowed introductory discounting to enable institutions to test degree of interest
Examine cost per download as factor in assessing value to the institution and appropriate tier placement in renewal.
Corporate pricing changes: still to be addressed
How did we address the need to restructure the tiers?
How did we communicate our decision?
As a not-for-profit educational society, SPIE strives to meet its responsibility to consider the economic challenges facing the educational and research community. In the current global economic climate, SPIE realizes that libraries are faced with tighter budgets than ever before for acquiring needed resources.
A combination of careful stewardship and steady growth of the subscription base since the launch of the SPIE Digital Library in 2003 are enabling the Society to roll back prices without reducing services, features, or content. Through this price decrease, we hope to enable access to this information for many more researchers, students, and inventors around the world.
Eugene Arthurs, SPIE Executive Director May 28, 2009
How did we fare? 2010 renewals have been robust.
We lost one consortium in 2010 due to the economic crisis.
99% renewal rate for all other accounts consistent with pre 2010 performance
New business since our announcement in June 2009 has exceeded 2009 growth levels.
New business has been across all tiers, but particularly strong in the new lower tiers.
Looking beyond 2010, SPIE plans to continue to seek ways to moderate price increases and potentially continue rollbacks as our subscriber base grows.
How applicable is SPIE’s response to the scholarly publishing community
Questions for all of us
• Is one lone not-for-profit’s actions meaningful in any way in the larger context of scholarly publishing? Does that put SPIE’s action under the heading of “titling at windmills” and meaningless in the larger arena?
• A number of publishers froze prices in 2010 in respond to the library’s plea for addressing the continued and ever escalating price increases. But is the fundamental dilemma for libraries so rooted in their arrangements with the mega publishers and the ‘big deals” that any action outside of this by any non-profit or non-mega is meaningless?
• And if libraries do not, or can not, act by changing their spending approach, in essence voting with their dollars or euros or pounds, who then who is to blame for the continuing trends in increased pricing?
• And more importantly perhaps is the question: what does the future hold if all continues without change?
Thank you,Marybeth Manning
Director, SPIE Digital Library Sales
and Business Development
marybeth@spie.org
UKSG Stand # 46
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