Evolving as a STEM Publisher to Meet Changing Library Needs By Melissa K. Fulkerson (Vice President, Research Reference, Elsevier) <m.fulkerson@elsevier.com>
Introduction Late in 2019, I took on leadership of the global STEM books portfolio at Elsevier. This encompasses all channels libraries use to access and acquire books: print, all major aggregators, and consumer electronic channels, but most notably our own institutional platform, ScienceDirect, where our roughly 40,000 pieces of reference content live alongside our journals. This article is not intended to promote ScienceDirect or Elsevier books specifically, but rather to share and reflect on what I’ve seen as we have all worked through the last 22 months and all the uncertainty, challenges, and unexpected opportunities that have come with the pandemic. As mentioned in the September 2021 issue of Against the Grain on eBooks from the academic library perspective, the print to electronic migration for eBooks began over two decades ago (Gibbs, 2021). At the time, publishers were trying to understand the best way to deliver content electronically. What readers most often got was a flat PDF, and over time the more interactive EPUB format took hold in consumer channels. A version of this is often what readers will get if downloading an eBook from a retailer for personal use today. But in the academic library market, what we all hoped would be simple ultimately became complex, due to the large number of publishers and vendors all having slightly different views on how electronic content should be delivered and priced. And now, many years later, our industry asks our librarian community to play a significant role in ensuring that eBooks are requested, acquired, promoted, and used by stakeholders inside academic institutions. Again, as mentioned in the librarian viewpoints issue, “managing eBooks is mentally challenging” (Dinkins, 2021). Indeed, it has become so. Access is inconsistent, with some platforms offering DRMfree eBooks and others limiting concurrent usage. There are proprietary readers and PDF downloads at the full-book or, more often, chapter level. There are many, many business models, from EBA/DDA to ownership to subscription, which are intended to serve the wide and varied needs in different global markets but make offerings more complex. The challenge for publishers and vendors in this space is to deliver an increasingly useful and meaningful body of content in a way that makes it as easy as possible for librarians to ingest and derive value within their limited budgets.
COVID-19 and its Impacts I came into my new role with many ideas about how our eBooks were going to become a stronger part of the research community. Exactly 100 days after starting this job, the world shut down. Our employees went home from their offices, our customers shuttered their libraries, and the patrons we both aim to serve were left, at least at first, with few options for continuity of access to the print materials the libraries had spent decades acquiring and maintaining. I don’t want to belabor the point, except to say it was a herculean effort by librarians, faculty and administrators to shift from in-person to virtual learning and
Against the Grain / February 2022
research on such short notice. As a publisher/vendor that was anxiously watching to figure out how best to help, it was remarkable to witness and reinforced how important libraries — and librarians — are to the successful outcomes of their students and researchers. As a publisher, we worked swiftly to ensure access to our textbook content in the short term. We fully empathized with librarians who gave feedback that the temporary free eBook access offers from various publishers, while appreciated, in some cases caused logistical headaches with the communications needed to let patrons know the content was available — and when it was no longer available. We take that feedback and, though we hope to never be in this dire a position again, will use it to evolve for the future. The biggest takeaway I had from that first six-month period was that this content was being used, often and at high volumes. Through survey data, we could see that much of the traffic to this textbook content and our ScienceDirect Topics (which are created from foundational reference content) were largely driven by undergraduate students. For years we hadn’t considered undergrads, or any non-research users, a true core market for our STEM books, outside of the small number of true textbooks we published. But the use of our textbooks and reference materials alike opened our eyes to the demand that exists for foundational reference content in STEM fields, in electronic format that can be accessed anywhere.
Looking to the Future So how does a large STEM book publisher take the lessons from these unprecedented events and pivot to ensure we are providing what our community needs? As I look to the future, the following questions arise: • How can we provide librarians better insights into how our content is being used to ensure user needs are being met? • How can we help our librarian customers serve a wider patron base — not just researchers, as our content has historically been assumed it was limited to, but undergraduate students as well? • What is our role in ensuring scientific literacy for an emerging generation of learners? I’ll take these three items each on their own, with the caveat that we are constantly learning and evolving, and we actively seek feedback to ensure we are addressing the right problems in a meaningful way.
Providing Better Insights Our team at Elsevier spends numerous resources identifying and delivering insights into our content that can be shared with customers to aid in decision-making. Simple data points like usage and turnaways are standard at this point across vendors, but we are also providing tools to look at the overall ScienceDirect landscape and identify where library investments might be best targeted to ensure the strongest ROI on both books and journals. For example, in disciplines that show high co-usage
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