the strategic marketing of science, technology, and medical journals: a business history of a dynamic marketplace, 2000-2020

This book analyzes the various economic and marketing strategies utilized by the five major STM commercial scholarly journal publishers since 2000. This period has witnessed tremendous economic, marketing, and technological growth including the migration from a print only to a hybrid publishing format. With this growth, the industry has also seen the rise of open access publishing, copyright challenges by websites such as Sci-Hub, the emergence of sharing platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, as well as the impact of Plan S on publishers, universities, and authors. Given this incredible rate of change across the industry, the author explores the diverse strategies and structures created by the largest STm publishers to decipher their effectiveness in addressing technological, ethical, and copyright issues. Also, he examines how mergers and acquisitions diversified operations, such Elsevier’s acquisition of Bepress, SSRN, and SCOPUS, among other platforms. Scrutinizing the different managerial, marketing, technology, and economic-financial strategies crafted by scholarly journal publishers between 2000-2020, this book offers a comprehensive assessment of the industry’s attempts to identify, understand, cope with, and minimize or defeat the herculean threats to its business model.

Albert N. Greco is Professor of Marketing at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University, USA. He has authored or edited 27 books, mostly in relation to the book and scholarly journal industries, though he has also written extensively on the newspaper, magazine, information, and radio sectors.