Serials can be fulfilling too…

Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Institute of Physics. The Institute of Physics is a membership organization, of which three quarters are UK and Ireland based physicists working in universities, research, industry, etc. We publish 35 journal titles as well as a series of B2B magazines, including Physics World.

We are a small part of a very large market. Statistics on scientific technical and medical (STM) publishing vary widely. The size of the market can range from anywhere between £4bn and £7bn worldwide. STM journal publishing is a truly international business. Most UK professional, society and commercial journal publishers will have greater circulation for their periodicals outside the domestic market. In the case of IOPP, although the UK is important, subscription levels are far higher in countries such as Germany, Japan and the USA.

Fulfilment – the old requirements

Up until the mid 1990s, the world of serial subscriptions was a much less complex one than it is today. The typical subscription process was as follows:

Step 1. The customer (often an institution) orders the printed journal via a subscription agent.
Step 2. The subscription agent orders the printed journal from the publisher.
Step 3. The publisher delivers the printed journal to the customer (sometimes via the subscription agent, sometimes direct).
Step 4. The user comes into the library to read the journal.

The end? It was in those days.

A professional serials publisher simply needed a system where you cranked the handle and out of the other end would flow invoices, labels and dispatch notes, and stock levels were managed automatically.

The downside of the old system was that, very often, the publisher had little or no knowledge of the end user and little inclination to find out more. The relationship with the end user as a customer was not being managed.

Fulfilment – the new requirements

Today, the situation is very different. The end user often prefers a relationship with the publisher (easier to negotiate with someone you know than someone you don’t). The print journal is, at times, a by-product (and often an unwanted by-product) when all the customer wants is electronic access to the journals to which they have subscribed. And the assumption is that if there is no physical delivery of print, then the journal must be cheaper!

Today, it is not enough just to deliver print. The journal must exist in electronic form, at least in scientific communication. An STM journal that has no electronic access, struggles to remain visible (and viable?) in an increasingly competitive environment. The serial must be accessible to all researchers within the institution. The reader, researcher, scientist, teacher must be able to access the article from the journal from anywhere in the university (or indeed from anywhere they may be located to do their work!). The institution (which may have taken several subscriptions in the past – in the lab, in the office, in the library, etc) now only wants to pay once and give all researchers access. More access for less money?

For the last 10 years, IOPP has operated a print fulfilment system which did exactly what it said on the box. It fulfilled print orders. Each year, thousands of print orders were entered manually. The system worked well when the process was relatively routine, if voluminous. However, start to gravitate away from the norm and then problems start to happen. For example, when:

* Customers want to mix and match (some print, some electronic).
* Some customers want electronic only access.
* Others have no access to the internet.
* A user may only want to buy content by the slice (article, book chapter, subject class).

Web search engines, such as Google, have had a dramatic effect on journal usage and, subsequently, a growth in ‘pay and go’ type transactions where the researcher buys access to a single article rather than subscribe to the entire journal. The ‘just in time’ rather than the ‘just in case’ approach.

Our legacy system, although it did the basics very well, was simply not set up for the demands of e-commerce and the changing world of serial supply.

Managing electronic versions

The journals publisher has the choice of deciding where and how to offer electronic versions of the journals. Should you host the journals locally and retain an IT function to maintain and develop the service, or would it be more effective to give the service to a third party to manage on your behalf. Over the last 10 years, many different organizations have started offering third party journal hosting services such as Ebsco (Metapress), Ingenta and HighWire Press. The publisher provides regular feeds to the host and the service is updated frequently.

IOPP has always preferred to host its own journals and to offer them to customers directly from its website. Originally, there were two separate systems, one to manage print fulfilment and the other to enable digital rights to journal content. We undertook a thorough review of our internal systems and processes to try and decide which way our business would develop in the coming years. In 2004, we took a decision to update our systems and develop a state of the art system which would manage the subscription as a single transaction, regardless of its format. The Holy Grail of serials fulfilment! If the customer wants print and / or electronic access to a journal, the transaction would be processed and managed from a single point of entry. To our surprise there were no off-the-shelf systems available which would offer both.

We had concluded that it was important to manage all formats from a single database because we wanted a better understanding of our customer. Specifically we wanted to:

* understand who is using the journal (sector, geographic location, name of institution, type of user). We want to interact more directly with the end user.
* understand how the journal is being used (download statistics, abstracts, references). Which articles / content / journals are being used more than others? And why? What are the usage patterns? Does this impact on any future publishing directions?
* understand the relationship between the author and the reader, so that we can better produce products and services which best match the needs of the researcher at that institution. Is the reader also submitting papers to the journal? Is the board member / editor supporting the journal by asking their institution to buy the journal for their collection? Is there high usage from an institution who is not publishing papers with that journal?

Below are two examples of how we will want our new system to operate:

Example 1: Having analyzed journal usage patterns, we will be able to observe the correlation between acquisition and usage of two or more journals. A unified fulfilment system, with the appropriate reporting tools, will enable the publisher to identify the universe of customers for those titles and then target those institutions not taking both.

The fulfilment system will be linked to a reporting system which updates overnight. The reporting system will provide statistics on:

* subscription values and numbers (units)
* electronic access and registration status
* payment histories / dates
* usage

The statistics can then be filtered in a variety of ways – by country / region, by sales manager for managing performance against target, by product, by industry sector. The fulfilment system will also be indirectly linked to a campaign management tool.

Example 2: Increasingly, institutions expect detailed analysis of their journal usage. Metrics such as cost per page (cost of journal divided by the total number of pages in the volume) or cost per download are becomingly accepted standards. The metrics are used to justify whether the institution should retain its subscription or whether to add a subscription to a title. Standards have been produced to help libraries integrate statistics into their management information systems and for different publisher usage figures to appear in a single standard format. (See: www.projectcounter.org)

An integrated ‘rights’ (print or electronic) management system permits the publisher to control subscription yields much more effectively. In the old world, the journal was measured by the number of print subscriptions it had –institutional, private individuals, members. The yield was defined as the cover price (less any subscription agency discounts).

In the modern world of serials online however, a journal available electronically isn’t accessed only by institutions that have taken out a subscription. The journal can be included in certain electronic only offerings such as site licences, e-packages, etc. Typically, when the content is bundled, the subscription value per journal is lower than if the institution were to acquire a full rate version of that journal. In the modern electronic world, there are fewer print subscriptions than 10-15 years ago, largely because all of the duplicate print copies have been replaced by the single electronic site licence, which generally costs little more (if any) than the cost of a single subscription. However the total number of institutions accessing the journal has increased significantly.

Most STM publishers are interested in increasing efficiencies and increasing revenue streams, ideally by maximizing existing product lines and by generating new income by developing new products, as well as by keeping costs at a minimum. At the same time, we want to provide our customers with the highest level of service and the best possible ‘product’. An integrated fulfilment and rights system, combined with a better understanding of the customer and their research interests (down to an individual level) will help to identify possible new product offerings which cut across existing content (content by subject rather than by journal title). The rights system needs to be nimble enough to allow the product manager (marketer) to create custom products ‘on-the-fly’ and offer them to target customers.

For a serials publisher to survive and thrive in today’s e-commerce economy, it is not enough just to have good product (important though that may be). The publisher needs to have systems in place to deliver the product to the customer in the way they want it, and when they want it.