CUP to modernise journal publishing

CambridgeUniversity Press (CUP) is planning to make big advances in the journal publishing market, following a £1m investment in a new back-end
journal subscription system.

The charity, which is technically the publishing division of the University of Cambridge, also expects to be back in the black in the current
financial year, following four years of overall loss-making.

The publisher appointed Stephen Bourne as chief executive officer in early 2002 to head up its recovery. CUP’s 196-strong list of journals is currently biased 60:40 towards humanities (115 titles), but journals sales and marketing director Ian Banbery said more emphasis would now be put on science, technology and medical (STM) titles.

“We had a boost when we acquired Greenwich Medical Media in 2003, with its journals, and [former GMM managing director] Geoff Nuttall has really shaken up thinking in the journals area,” said Banbery ( click here for more CUP news).

“We are going to make a significant investment in journals over the next 18 months,embark on a process of modernisation, and replace our
20-year-old Vista subscription system,” he added. “Currently, we have four sources of sales information, and we need to unify andconsolidate that.”

Tristan Collier, CUP’s business development manager for journals, admitted that competition in STM journal publishing was tough, especially withBlackwell aggressively targeting society journals. “But the fact is that STM journals are more profitable than humanities, and we have the opportunity to make inroads as societies generally put their journals out to tender every three to five years to fulfill their charitable status.”

Collier said CUP was not going to be left behind on the open access front, and would follow in the steps of Springer,OUP and Blackwell. “We’ll be launching 10 journals on the hybrid publishing model in the next year,” he said. “We are also looking at finding more backing for open access along the lines of our free Breast Cancer online journal, which is funded by AstraZeneca.”

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