Hello fellow journalologists,
This is the first newsletter of 2023 — I hope you’re settling back into work after a relaxing Christmas break. This week I’ve been in Berlin attending the APE meeting, which was time very well spent. I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with old friends and making new acquaintances. I returned home last night and haven’t had a chance to properly digest what I learned at the meeting. Perhaps that will be a topic for next week’s newsletter.
Yesterday we released the January issue of The Brief, which covered:
If you’re one of the few people in scholarly publishing who hasn’t subscribed to The Brief yet, you can do so here. Please also encourage your colleagues to subscribe to the Journalology newsletter here.
January can be a highly productive time of the year. The budget has (hopefully!) been signed off and the monthly management reporting hasn’t started yet. So there should be plenty of time to plan for the year ahead and to set objectives for journals and staff alike.
At the APE conference this week Judy Verses (President, Academic and Government Markets at Elsevier) repeatedly made the point that ‘what gets measured gets done’. I couldn’t agree more, so I thought it might be helpful to give a summary of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that I’d be monitoring on a regular basis if I was still responsible for a journal portfolio.
I’m largely focusing here on non-financial KPIs. Keeping on top of revenues and costs is bread and butter for publishers, and has been a constant over the years. However, the move to OA means that new non-financial indicators are needed to create high performing journals.
What follows is by no means comprehensive, but hopefully covers the main bases.
Rapid publication is a competitive advantage and some publishers have gained market share by publishing papers quickly. If you can knock a month off the time from submission to publication this year for your fully OA journals, you will increase revenues by ~8%. This is good for the publisher and is also a good author service.
Monitoring the publication pipeline is vital, especially for larger journals. Editorial and publishing teams need to ensure that there is not a ‘blockage’ in the pipeline, and if there is to redeploy resources accordingly. The pipeline might be broken down in the following way:
Increasingly publishers are developing portfolio strategies where the journals in the portfolio support each other by providing transfers from more to less selective journals. This can help the publisher commercially and also provides a better author experience (yes, this is a recurring theme). Publishers and editorial managers should be assessing:
For fully OA journals a good author experience means more repeat business and, equally importantly, more recommendations to colleagues. Measuring author experience is vital. Net promotor scores are problematic in many ways, but are better than nothing.
I hope this list will give you some inspiration for 2023. Measuring and monitoring KPIs is important, but taking action on KPIs that fall short of expectations is key. The publishing landscape is increasingly competitive and keeping on top of the performance of the journals you’re responsible for is vital; many of your competitors will certainly be measuring KPIs carefully.
If you need help, support or guidance setting KPIs for 2023 please get in contact (james@journalology.com). The Clarke & Esposito team regularly works with publishers to help them to improve the performance of their portfolio and to develop a comprehensive portfolio strategy. We would be delighted to assist in any way that we can.
… will return soon. I chose to spend time at the APE bar socialising this week rather than reading the news wires. It wasn't a difficult decision to make...
Until next week,
James
The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, It’s been a relatively quiet news week. Maybe publishers are keeping their powder dry ready for the Frankfurt Book Fair next week? Or perhaps everyone has been spending all their time telling the world how they published the seminal Nobel prize winning work? Regardless, it won't take you long to skim through this newsletter, which will likely be a relief, especially if you’re on your way to Frankfurt. If you're using the Book Fair to...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, A few hours after hitting the ’send’ button on last week’s newsletter I saw a tweet about Heliyon — a broad-scope journal published by Elsevier and hosted on the Cell press website — being put ’on hold’ for indexing by Web of Science. That piqued my interest because I had just started drafting an article about Heliyon and Cureus, the two journals that grew the fastest in 2023, for the Digital Science Dimensions blog. I naturally wanted to...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Many of us took part in Peer Review Week, which ends today. The sheer scale of the number of events was overwhelming (see here). You can watch my own contribution, alongside Danielle Padula from Scholastica, on YouTube by clicking the play button below: We talked about how the role of a journal editor may be affected by advances in technology. (My 8-year-old son was very impressed that I’m a ’YouTuber’, but he complained: “I didn’t...