21st January 2021

Welcome to 2021 (lets hope its better than 2020!)

We don’t normally do an end of year/start of year review, but we also would normally have seen many of our clients and colleagues over the last 12 months at conferences. This is our opportunity to update everyone on some of the projects we have been working on.

We’ve had a really interesting year from a work perspective. Some of our work has been sparked by the challenge of operating during a pandemic. Other projects have just been about getting heads down and carrying on with normal business practices. Despite everything, our work has continued to be interesting and challenging and has helped us stay sane in these strangest of days, and we thought you might like to hear about some of it.

Here’s to seeing you in person in 2021.

Simon, Julie, Tracy and Sam

Publications: Open Access

A significant portion of our work involves helping societies make decisions about the future direction of their journals portfolio. Many societies ask us “Should we go Open Access, and if so how”? The answer is always “that depends”. Before providing a society with the pros and cons of options open to them, we undertake market analysis, stakeholder interviews, and take a good hard look at the data. It surprises some clients when we also spend time understanding the mission of the society itself, and understanding how publications fit in to the rest of the organisation and what they are trying to achieve, both within the publications portfolio, but also more widely.

Consequently, our advice to clients varies, depending on their particular circumstances and disciplines. We recently realised that in the last few years we have advised one client to take an open journal and put it behind a paywall, another to flip their entire portfolio to open access, and a third to keep one of the journals they thought they needed to flip as a subscription journal, and to launch new OA journals instead with their publishing partner. We’ve also supported self-publishing societies to launch new OA journals, both high impact and cascade. Our most recent project has seen us advising a client to sell their portfolio entirely, and use the money they could raise to pursue another society-related project.

This year we particularly enjoyed working with ASBMB who not only decided to flip their flagship journal (one of the biggest in the world) to Open Access, but they also decided to switch from being self-publishing to partnering with a commercial publisher. We helped them manage that process from the initial review of their publications, through scenario modelling, supporting their decision making, and then running the tender process for them, and helping them with contractual negotiations.

For us, it always comes back to taking a strategic approach starting with mission and we are working with a number of societies right now helping them address these big questions.

Membership: Surveys and Community Building

As the community around a journal, and indeed around a society, becomes more clearly a critical success factor, our work has taken us in a new direction.

A client we were working with this summer run an annual membership survey for many years which they gave to us as in input for some of our work on their publications program. It left us with more questions than it answered; and seeing as they were just about to launch their 2020 survey we worked with them to craft a new set of questions, which would help them answer how to move forwards in prioritising their activities – not just publications.

It was a happy moment of realising that the survey work we have been undertaking for years as part of How Readers Discover Content (which we are running again in 2021: news release below) serves us exceptionally well here. We collected some rich data which allowed us and our client to test a number of hypotheses that provided answers they could use in decision-making on a number of fronts. Without giving away the crown jewels, we discovered there were significant differences in what members wanted from the society, depending on their geographical location; that there was more demand for community building and networking opportunities than the society had previously realised; and that a surprising number of younger members were already at a stage in their careers where they wanted to “give back” to their communities.

Meetings: Society Street

You may know that Renew Consultants are the instigators of Society Street, a conference we launched in 2017 which aims to bring together learned society leaders – and future leaders – for discussion, debate, networking, and information exchange, uniquely focussed on the whole organization. 2020 was the year we were due to launch in the USA, kicking off in March in Washington DC. However, 2020 had other plans, and we had to quickly pivot to an online conference – which grew into a monthly webinar series. Because our sponsors were able to continue to support us, we were able to make all of the sessions free, and have made all of the content is available on demand via our website: societystreet.org. Take a look – we would recommend the sessions on meetings (which we ran in March, May, and November) as lively, informative and interesting discussions!

This year we will continue to run online events and are working on the program right now – until we can meet again in person. If you’d like to be kept in the loop on Society Street events, please sign up for our occasional mailings

4th December 2020

How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals 2021

Ready to launch in January 2021

Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger, co-authors of How Readers Discovery content in Scholarly Journals, are pleased to announce that their 2021 survey is ready to launch in January.

How Readers Discovery content in Scholarly Journals is a three-yearly wide-ranging survey of user behaviour, mapping the changing nature of how readers, from all over the world, find academic content, and has been running since 2005.

The survey, which will take place between January and March 2021, will provide publishers with insights into changing user behaviour, and will be published Open Access in the first half of 2021, thanks to the support from the following organizations:

• American Medical Association
• American Psychological Association
• American Society for Microbiology
• Annual Reviews
• Bone & Joint Publishing
• IOP Publishing
• Kudos
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• Taylor and Francis Group
• TrendMD
• Wiley

The 2021 survey will build upon previous surveys, allowing for longitudinal analysis over the sixteen-year span, and allowing for trend analyses over time. In addition, the 2021 survey will explore discovery of Open Access content in more depth, will ask specific questions about the discovery of the Version of Record, and builds on the 2018 questions about discovery of academic video content.

Tracy Gardner said “Our research provides the scholarly communications community with vital information about how researchers find content, and shows the difference in discovery behaviour across disciplines, regions, sectors, and job roles. We are able to make the report openly available to our community with the support of publishers, societies and intermediaries, and are very pleased have such an esteemed group of organisations supporting us.”

Simon Inger said “How researchers discover Open Access content is not as straight forward as many believe. Maximising content discovery is crucial for publishers, and we hope this research will demonstrate how we, as an industry, can make the quality content that is published Open Access as widely discoverable as possible.”

If your organization would like to support this research, we invite you to get in touch with Tracy Gardner  to discuss sponsorship opportunities.

The 2018 report and a number of presentations related to the research can be found here.