Publisher’s Report for SDS Policy Council (February 2004)
Confidential – not for republication
Steve Hardman shardman@wiley.co.uk
SYSTEM DYNAMICS REVIEW
PUBLISHER’S MISSION STATEMENT
· To increase the visibility of the journal throughout the world both geographically and to different groups.
· To increase usage of the journal; and to grow revenue through subscriptions, licences and individual pay-per-view.
· To work with the SDS to increase the membership.
· To realize the potential of the internet and the developmental potential for the journal.
· To increase the citation coverage.
SOME HIGHLIGHTS
§ Online usage statistics (see later in this report). We hope the information provided is interesting and that it will be of use to the Society and the editor in their planning and development of the journal. Feedback on the statistics is always appreciated.
§ Online repository for models, simulations and datasets: once the repository is set up (with, say, a supportive university server) and it is populated – we will link available models, methods, or datasets linked from the online abstracts of papers themselves. This will not only allow easy navigation, but would enable guest users to appreciate even more the value of getting a subscription or joining the SDS.
OVERVIEW
Published with Wiley since: 1990
Issues per year: 4
Major geographical split 2003 (excluding SDS members): Western Europe / USA / Asia / UK / Japan
|
Price |
Full |
SDS |
SDS Student |
|
2004 |
$565 |
$90 |
$45 |
|
2003 |
$530 |
$90 |
$45 |
|
2002 |
$495 |
$90 |
$45 |
|
2001 |
$465 |
$90 |
$45 |
|
2000 |
$430 |
$90 |
$45 |
|
1999 |
$395 |
$80 |
$40 |
Overview of membership numbers and growth of EALs
|
Subscriptions |
SDS |
Enhanced Access Licences (EALs) |
|
At end 2003 |
952* |
45 |
|
At end 2002 |
884 |
41 |
|
At end 2001 |
842 |
28 |
|
At end 2000 |
779 |
9
|
* comprising 202 student members and 750 regular members.
Our target audience is, of course, made up of researchers, educators, consultants, and practitioners who are using system dynamics.
Society membership appears to have increased by nearly 5% during 2000, 8% in 2001, 5% in 2002, and well over 7% in 2003, all of which is consistently excellent. SDS membership clearly remains an attractive package for people working or researching within the field of system dynamics.
In order to stay customer facing in the rapidly transitioning journals business we have been actively developing several different delivery options for our journal users.
The latest development is "access to individual articles" which started in May 2003, and these are available on a pay-per-view basis. There have been eight papers accessed via PPV so far, with a peak of four in August. The eight articles accessed so far in this way for SDR are:
· System dynamics for business strategy: a phased approach (Vol. 15, No. 1) James M. Lyneis
· Macro- and micro-modeling of field service dynamics (Vol. 15, No. 2) Jack B. Homer
· A dynamic model of resource allocation in multi-project research and development systems (Vol. 16, No. 3) Nelson P. Repenning
· Management of the "skills inventory" in times of major change (Vol. 17, No. 2) Graham W. Winch
· Understanding and managing innovation processes (Vol. 18, No. 1) Peter M. Milling
· Group model building effectiveness: a review of assessment studies (Vol. 18, No. 1) Etiënne A. J. A. Rouwette, Jac A. M. Vennix, Theo van Mullekom
· Opportunities and pitfalls related to e-commerce strategies in small-medium firms: a system dynamics approach (Vol. 18, No. 3) Carmine Bianchi, Enzo Bivona
· A dynamic model of work quality in a government oversight organization (Vol. 18, No. 4) Christopher S. Trost
This works for anyone visiting Wiley InterScience whether they subscribe to any other journal or not. (Any Wiley InterScience journal article can be purchased for $25 per article for access limited to 24 hours. We can immediately see there is an opportunity here to suggest to any regular downloaders of SDR material that they would be better off joining the Society instead.)
Major e-licensing deals - such as the one Wiley have entered into with library-supplier ProQuest [see box below] for all Wiley business, finance and management journals - are also making sure that we can reach more "information consumers" with the journal than ever before. At the same time, a university’s enhanced access licence (EAL) is allowing multiple users to access the journal simultaneously, across multiple sites at that university.
PROQUEST DEAL
This major aggregator of reference material for (non-academic) libraries signed with Wiley in 2002 to take all 40 Wiley business, finance, and management journals (the Wiley BoldIdeas collection).
ProQuest will make the full text of SDR available to their subscribers - starting with last year's issues but on a time-lag basis. (They will not be able to distribute anything until it has been published for at least twelve months.)
For Year One of the deal, ProQuest have paid an advance royalty fee split evenly across all 40 journals. In future, royalties earned may be split on the basis of actual usage.
SDR 's inclusion in the ProQuest collection will undoubtedly bring the journal to the attention of new readers and enable more people to access - and cite - the research that is published.
Computing Reviews, Current Contents/Social and Behavioural Sciences (ISI), Fluidex (Elsevier), Geographical Abstracts: Human Geography (Elsevier), INSPEC, International Abstracts in Operations Research, Psychological Abstracts/PsycINFO, Research Alert (ISI), Social Sciences Citation Index (ISI), Social SciSearch (ISI).
Impact factor
Impact factor figures for 2002 from the ISI are now available. Although we saw an improvement in SDR's impact factor in 2001 to 0.588 from 0.455 in 2000, the figures for 2002 show a fall back to 0.455 again.
The number of cites, however, rose slightly to 138, over 125 in 2001.
We will continue to look for ways to improve the citation coverage again, and any additional suggestions for coverage are always welcome.
The Senior Production Editor responsible for SDR – John McCarty – reports that the copy is all in for 20:1 (Spring 2004) and this issue should publish on schedule therefore. Issue 20:2 is a special issue.
SDR is available online at Wiley InterScience to subscribers with appropriate access status. Archival years of full text go back to 1997 with (abstracts also available for 1996). In addition SDS members, with their 2004 subscription, also receive access to SDR on Wiley InterScience.
· The membership take up of electronic access to the journal is working very smoothly.There are currently 767 members accessing SDR online.This is up 35% on the 566 members who had arranged access in July 2002 and represents more than 80% of the membership. This is a very encouraging take-up rate for electronic access, and is probably the most widespread that Wiley have with any society journal.
· As mentioned above, we are keen to see the addition of links to supplementary material from the SDR homepage, and especially the possibility of making downloadable models available. Any plans to make full model documentation available as a link from the online System Dynamics Review to a data archive will certainly add an extra dimension to the journal online. Giving users the opportunity to replicate models easily is an excellent example of how electronic access can offer more than the print version alone. This will undoubtedly also have powerful applications in the teaching of system dynamics theory.
ContentAlerts (ToC) registration
As mentioned above, EarlyView could go live whenever required. In the meantime, any registered Wiley InterScience user may now sign up for ContentAlerts and receive, via email, a hyperlinked table of contents for the most recent issue of any Wiley InterScience journal including SDR. These emails are generated as soon as a full issue is published in Wiley InterScience. Users do not even need to be subscribers to sign up for ContentAlerts, although access to the full text is, of course, limited to subscribers or those going through the pay-per-view route. To get started, you need only to select the "Add Alert" button on the Available Issues page for SDR; you can manage your list of alerts from your personal home page on Wiley InterScience (which you set up by registering). We would urge all involved with the journal to register for these alerts, and we would be happy to provide more detailed instructions on how to register for them if required.
A sample copy of the journal (the same as that used for print sample copy distribution) is available online and can be viewed free of charge, via Wiley InterScience.
1. Pay-per-view promotion
In 2002, nearly three million users were denied access to journal articles because they were not covered by a license. Pay-per-view allows these users to simply click and purchase. The first article sold within five minutes of going live! From a marketing perspective, this major new service will allow us to operate in unprecedented ways:
We are keen to continue strengthening our relationship with individual members of the Society, and will maintain the 15% discount scheme on all our business books that we set in place last year (bookmarks promoting this were sent to the 2003 conference and an advertisement placed in the conference literature). This is an attractive benefit for Society members.
We will continue to seek new ways of adding value to Society membership through our publishing programmes and marketing activity.
We are pleased to be printing proceedings for the 2004 conference in Oxford, and look forward to once again being an active participant in the event.
We are again attending the annual meeting of the UK regional Chapter of the Society. In addition we are investigating ways in which we can leverage the annual meetings of the other regional Chapters around the world, and aiming to establish an ongoing infrastructure for regular cooperation in the future.
3. Cross-marketing initiatives
System Dynamics as a discipline cuts across many fields Although the marketing of System Dynamics Review is managed from within our Business group, we will continue to ensure that it is included in all appropriate mailings from other relevant groups, for instance Finance and Environmental Science.
We frequently publish books with relevance to System Dynamics Review, and will ensure that we capitalise on any opportunities to cross-promote between our book and journal audiences. For instance, wherever possible we will aim to advertise the journal in the endpapers of relevant books.
With other journals
In today’s climate of declining subscriptions, the acquisition of a ‘body of knowledge’ is often more attractive to customers than subscription to a single journal. We will continue to market System Dynamics Review in this way, leveraging aggregators and consortia wherever possible to increase usage.
We will promote System Dynamics Review at all relevant events we attend through the year, and make efforts to promote at further events via leaflet insertions. Sample issues of the journal will continue to form the basis of this promotion, but with renewed emphasis on registering with Interscience to view the sample issue online.
6. Ad-hoc marketing activity
Whenever we have features or news relating to System Dynamics Review, we will inform our audience of business book and journal buyers. For instance we can announce forthcoming Special Issues ahead of time to targeted audiences, or provide extra ‘buzz’ promotion for highly-cited or well-reviewed articles (see the ‘Pay-Per-View’ section above). Further opportunistic activity will take place as appropriate.
Feedback on access to SDR online
There are some very interesting new internal reports on SDR online usage via Wiley InterScience now available.
For instance, some highlights during 2003
· 57,000 views of SDR Tables of Contents (up from 46,000 in 2002; 29,800 in 2001; and 16,300 in 2000)
· 11,000 online abstracts looked at (up from 9,200 in 2003; 6,500 in 2001; and 4,600 in 2000)
· Over 40,000 nearly 27,000 online PDFs of articles looked at (up from 27,000 in 2002; 16,000 in 2001; and 4,800 in 2000)
· 3,500 access attempts were denied access* up from 3,300 attempts in 2002
(*Basically this means they either had no subscription to the full-text version, or their institution didn't have enough concurrent-user subscriptions.)
As an aid to seeing which particular papers from SDR are being downloaded, we have prepared a report of the top 100 articles downloaded (attached separately) between January and December 2003, which is made available to the meeting on a confidential basis.
Steve Hardman
shardman@wiley.co.uk