nature publishing group From a single magazine to an essential scientific resource ICOLC Meeting – Philadelphia 27 March, 2006 Della Sar & Geoff Worton

Today’s presentation A Brief overview of Nature Publishing Group A review of our business model How we have had to change Recent policies On the table for discussion

A brief overview of Nature Publishing Group Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, dedicated to serving the academic, professional scientific and medical communities NPG's flagship title, Nature, is the world's most highly- cited weekly multidisciplinary journal and was first published in 1869 Other publications and services include Nature research journals, Nature Reviews, Nature Clinical Practice, a range of prestigious academic journals

NPG Global Offices New York City San Francisco, CATokyo, Japan Washington, D.C. Munich, Germany Boston, MA London & Basingstoke UK Delhi, India

Founded in 1869 Publishes 51 issues a year Nature is the outstanding scientific journal Over 100 people including 62 journalist & editors are employed to work on Nature alone Has the highest impact factor of all multi-disciplinary journals Nature was sold to individuals by subscription or from newspaper stands for over 100 years Online edition of Nature first mounted 1997

Review of the business model Slicing the pie in 1999

Review of the business model Slicing the pie the 2006

Advertising Revenue 1999  36% Revenue dependant on print circulation Most profitable contribution to NPG 2006  23% Still dependent on print circulation Still most profitable contribution to NPG

Reference Revenue % Reference  Encyclopedia style books  Directories - high cost of production and sales 2006 NPG no longer publishes reference works

Copy and Institutional Revenue %  Libraries at academic/government institutions and corporations  Individuals  No site license revenue %  37% print copy sales  29% Site License and Archive Income

Other Income % Other Revenue  Document delivery  News syndication  Author reprints  Conferences %

Briefly Print worked –Institutional print prices for Nature offered outstanding value at little cost. There was lots of usage and many multiples of subscriptions with some large institutes taking up to 100 copies. Online made it complicated and very threatening NPG was a very late entrant into the game!

Introducing Site Licenses With institutional access, the personal circulation could disappear overnight, advertising revenue would be lost, and the business would collapse. In 1998, 500 selected organizations were offered institutional access with a user name and password, with a cap of five simultaneous users. Print copies were included. This worked reasonably well until 2000, within the more limited expectations of users at the time. The site license policy was revised. Pricing bands were introduced.

2001- How we calculate your prices Organisation type Size – Full Time Equivalents Numbers and combination of titles

Recent developments and challenges The rise of open access publication fees Digitization of archives – archive pricing Access-in-perpetuity to e-content - providing post-cancellation rights

Digitization of archives – archive pricing NPG invested heavily in digitizing back files in 2002, and began selling the 10-year Nature archive ( ) in summer Other archives have followed since. Pricing model – one-off fee (based on FTE) with small annual access fee. NPG is currently digitizing Nature back to 1869

Access-in-perpetuity to e-content: providing post-cancellation rights Much talked about in theory, but not always clear in practice, and certainly not simple! From 2006, NPG offers post-cancellation access rights to licensed content, subject to payment of an access fee. Some other publishers provide local hosting options We have an agreement to archive our academic journals collection with OCLC and are exploring options with Portico and The British Library

NPG doesn’t offer local hosting for several reasons:  Development of the nature.com brand  Direct relationship with users  Opportunity to add value (eg linking functionality, supplementary information)  Classified and banner advertising Local Hosting and NPG

On the table for discussion What are consortia:  How are they defined? “We’re not organized to have a definition” …Tom Sanville in an to Geoff Worton  How, when and why should we do business with them?  One negotiating, invoicing & licensing point?  Minimum number of members?

On the table for discussion Should we:  Price per download?  Offer multi-year subscription deals?  Offer platform only deals?

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