Investor interest in STM is piqued with the forthcoming IPO of Springer Nature, interest warranted by the resilience of STM and academic publishing and by the fact that, as Joe cites, “publishing continues to outperform expectations.”

The acquisition of Meta by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) promises to transform scientific investigation. As a byproduct of this, it will likely transform scientific publishing as well. I am on the Board of Directors of Meta, and I must say that the path to the company’s new ownership did not entirely come as a surprise. People have been sniffing around the company for the past two years as interest in data and data science has exploded. By working with the scientific literature, Meta has found a new way to expedite research and to bring added value to the underlying publications.

The portfolio of even a small publisher may include journals, books, databases, conferences, newsletters, Webinars, and much more, all of which increasingly are asked to work together. The various properties share many things — administrative overhead, for example, or a common customer database — and they also reinforce one another. Think of each property as a node on the network, gaining strength through the linkage to the other nodes. This has important implications, not least of which is Metcalfe’s Law: the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes attached to it. Every successful publisher is going to become the manager of a network publishing system.

Moderating a panel of three entrepreneurs, the common element that particularly caught my attention is something that I have had occasion to ponder many times. All three CEOs pounded on the issue of recruiting and retaining the best people. It is an obsession of the leadership of start-ups. One bad hire can stop a company in its tracks. 

In our first announced transaction, STM Advisers LLC is proud to have advised the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in its acquisition of PRE Peer Review Evaluation from the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Inc. We initiated the transaction and served as the representative of AAAS.

Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the two vectors on which scale operates in STM and scholarly publishing: horizontal and vertical. While horizontal scale has long been the province of commercial publishers, society publishers are typically organized to take advantage of vertical scale. The headwinds are presently blowing along the horizontal plane, from the perspective of the society publisher.