"Why Continue Print?"

Here we present two perspectives on the SSP 30th Annual Meeting session "Dropping Print Without Getting Hurt."

By Nancy Winchester, Director of Publications, American Society of Plant Biologists

Many of us in society publishing are feeling the financial strain of publishing our journals in print and shipping them around the world. But killing print and moving to an online-only environment isn’t for everyone . . . at least not yet. The 30th Annual Meeting session, "Dropping Print Without Getting Hurt," presented three publishers in three different situations, probably none of them unfamiliar to most of the audience.

Keith Seitter (American Meteorological Society) started getting pressure from his authors around 2005 to drop print in order to get rid of color charges and allow authors to use a lot more color online. But AMS had a lot of revenue tied up in print, and it knew there were no guarantees that the institutions taking print would all convert to online. They might just go away instead, leading to a financial catastrophe for AMS.

So the society decided to offer institutions an online subscription with the opportunity to add print to the online subscription for a modest additional fee. AMS has been working to increase the dollar differential between print + online and online-only on its way to ensuring that its print journals pay for themselves. As of 2007, about a third of its institutions were online only, about a third were taking print and had also activated online, and about a third were taking print and had not activated online. Print-on-demand and ultra-short-run printing could be considered as ways to get print to those who really want it while controlling costs.

Greg Malar (The Rockefeller University Press) said that the key question is not "Why stop print?" but "Why continue print?" given the many advantages of the online journal, improvements in archiving mechanisms, and the financial and environmental costs of printing and shipping. One solution to dealing with this changing landscape is to build up your multisite and consortial deals.

For those of you with editors who feel that if the journal isn’t in print it will "go away," consider print-on-demand and customized publishing. In 2007, 55% of RUP’s single-site institutional subs were still print-only; in 2008, RUP dropped print-only as an option and implemented a sizable fee to add print to an online sub, and 80% of the print customers kept print anyway. So RUP will be printing at least for a while longer, but at some point, like all publishers, it will have to make the decision to drop hard copy.

Constance Hardesty, editor of Journal AAHA, said the American Animal Hospital Association dropped print and suffered a "disaster." Most of AAHA’s subscriptions are through their members, and when the group dropped print to move to the benefits of online, it lost 20% of its members. Even though members gave the journal just a 3.3 on a scale of 1–5 for value, they also reported that they looked at every issue that lands in their mailbox. But they don’t all go online. And even those who do cannot necessarily print from their personal printers color images anywhere near the quality they need. AAHA is still committed to providing the functionality of an online journal, but it will probably start printing again too.

Take-home messages: Clearly the considerations involving print encompass more than just the financial ones. These three speakers gave us a good idea of some of the many other factors that might be easier to overlook. For example, how does your audience prefer to get information? Do your readers have easy access to the equipment they need to fully utilize online content . . . fast connections for sure, but what about a high-quality printer for color images? Is your content adequately archived to reassure librarians that it will be available in perpetuity? Are you striving for a surplus from print, or rather a break-even situation, in which the decision to drop print becomes more of a philosophical debate than a financial one? Are you concerned about the size of the carbon footprint (in terms of both printing and shipping) that your publication leaves? If your primary audience is your membership, instead of institutional libraries, do you know their preferences? Is a survey in order? And if so, are you really hearing what they’re telling you? Remember, just because YOU think something is exciting doesn’t mean your audience feels the same way! Quote of the day: "Whatever is appropriate for your audience is what you do."

Nancy Winchester is director of publications at the American Society of Plant Biologists. ASPB publishes two high-impact journals, and the online versions are the journals of record. Print is still popular, though.

By Marjorie Rawle Jones, American Chemical Society