SSP: A Volatile—but Promising—Year for Non-Profit Publishing
This has been…a year. I’d say unprecedented, but I think we can all agree we never want to read or hear that word ever again. Instead, let’s just say that it’s been unlike any most of us have ever experienced and we’re all looking forward to a time when things are, well, precedent-ed again. Most of us have gone through personal disruptions and challenges, and the publishing world (just like nearly every segment of the economy) faced the same destabilizations. For a non-profit and society publishing sector already facing a difficult path forward before the pandemic, the outlook at the beginning of this global pandemic looked grim.
To that end, SSP recently posted a wrap up of the state of not-for-profit publishing in 2020 on its Scholarly Kitchen blog. It’s a concise and insightful overview of the situation, with the primary takeaway that things didn’t necessarily take the catastrophic turn that everyone feared, especially for STM publishers. If anything, the pandemic made it clear just how necessary it is to have scholarly publishing and the quick and accurate dissemination of scientific information, even if the needed acceleration of this information also exposed some weaknesses in current processes and workflows.
And while not-for-profits have weathered the storm well, much of that is due to the fact that business models had locked in revenue before things went south, especially for member organizations. Conference revenues took a significant hit, but otherwise, memberships and institutional distribution revenue was steady, primarily because it had already been booked. What this means for 2021, however, gets a little less attention. What if the true cost of the pandemic for society publishers is actually being kicked into 2021? Right now, planned budgets don’t appear to be indicating that, but it’s certainly a looming possibility.
For humanities societies and university presses, it’s been more challenging in the short-term. University presses, in particular, rely more on unit sales of books to institutions, and as AAP numbers have consistently indicated, that’s been tough sledding in 2020. The uptick in retail has offset this some, but the overall dire situation in higher learning revenues, especially at public universities, has program directors clearly worried that presses may make for an agonizingly easy slice to cut from the annual-budget pie.
The Takeaway
So what to make of all of this? Well, for organizations that rely on fundraising in addition to membership dues—a sector that has been absolutely hammered by the pandemic—support and investment in subscription-based publications appears to be an increasingly safe bet for stable revenues, and the more diverse the offerings, the better, as the open-access push continues to force program directors to rethink current business models. For those already relying on publishing as their primary revenue stream, it’s probably time to find ways to invest in new workflows. While non-profit publishers weathered the 2020 storm, commercial publishers with the capital to invest have thrived during the pandemic.
Conversely, programs that rely on unit sales to institutional libraries are almost certainly looking at more seismic shifts and a prolonged downturn. Aggregation seems to be a potential path forward here, but it will be interesting to see what further innovation may spring from the…well, I don’t want to say ashes, but you get the point.
Overall, though, the picture painted here is surprisingly rosy. For an industry that’s undergone a fair amount of recent hand wringing, 2020 has shown how vital—and stable—scholarly publishing truly is for societies and not-for-profits.
