Blackwell Publishing

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :21/05/2007 16:04:12

Blackwell Publishing: Greater than the sum of its parts

At a time of dramatic development at Blackwell Publishing, Mike Fenton, group operations director, explains how the publisher is reaping the rewards of recent mergers and acquisitions by pooling knowledge to create a company relishing the challenges posed by a changing industry

Written by James Hurley & Produced by Kiron Chavda

The world's leading society publisher, Blackwell Publishing partners 665 academic, medical, and professional societies to publish 850 journals and, to date, has over 6,000 books in print. The company has over 1,000 staff members in offices in the US, UK, Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Singapore and Japan.

The long and rich history of Blackwell began in 1897 when booksellers BH Blackwell published its first book. A quarter of a century later, the Basil Blackwell & Mott publishing house was established in Oxford and in the pre-war period Blackwell Publishers produced a number of seminal novels, from writers including WH Auden, Graham Greene and JRR Tolkien. Sir Basil Blackwell founded Blackwell Scientific Publications in 1939, with the company initially focusing on Oxford-based medical publications. The two companies remained separate until 2001, one focusing on the humanities and social sciences, the other devoted to scientific, medical and professional publishing.

Merging for efficiency

Blackwell Publishing Ltd, the largest independent society publisher in the world, was formed with the merger of Blackwell Publishers and Blackwell Science. Blackwell Publishing’s group operations director, Mike Fenton says that the merger was necessitated by the changes that were affecting the industry.

“We had two publishing companies that were operating in different subject areas. The advent of technology meant that those subject areas needed merging. We were both in the process of developing web services. Blackwell Science was focusing on an online delivery platform for content and Blackwell Publishing was focusing on the delivery of society services. As societies are also key customers for the scientific environment, and our humanities and soft sciences that Blackwell Publishers served also wanted online delivery platforms, we could both build the same infrastructure.

“By putting the two companies together we could do better for ourselves – the whole was better than the sum of the individual parts. Operational efficiency was one of the key drivers, and it works. If you look over the past five years the results and the sales growth in the services that we deliver has been phenomenal in terms of the increase in productivity and efficiency,” he says.

Last February brought a further milestone in the development of Blackwell, when it was acquired by global publishing giant Wiley for £572 million. Fenton says that this acquisition bore many resemblances to the merger between the two Blackwell companies.

“There are huge opportunities here,” he says, “it’s almost like the merger of publishers and science, but on steroids. We’re all doing similar things. In terms of our publishing culture we’re very similar. We see the opportunites and threats in the market place very similarly. Consequently we’re both addressing it through the investment in online platforms and tools for authors and societies. Rather than having to do it all twice, we can do it once and better.”

Both companies had been simultaneously developing their online platforms prior to the merger, and Fenton says that this is another area where combined knowledge was helpful. “We want to bring those two things together in a best of breed approach, and that’s the approach we’re taking through the merger – in reality it was an acquisition but we’re treating it as a merger. We’re looking at how to bring the best of both companies together and that can only be a good thing for our clients and customers.

“We’ve done slightly more than Wiley in certain aspects of service provision, whereas Wiley have certain aspects of internal workflows and processing that’s in advance of Blackwell. If we end up adopting the best of both worlds we should end up with an even more efficient organisation in a couple of years’ time than the individual components were.”

Fenton is aware that bringing two very large organisations together will be far from easy, but he’s optimistic about how the future of the combined entity. “The two companies must have something in the region of 2500 people between them. Converging processes and procedures, from market approach to sales reporting, is not simple. Whatever we project we’ll be doing initially, when we get into the detail we’ll be doing it differently. The challenge is to converge these differences and come up with something that works for our customers and clients and adds value for them.”

The access revolution

To say that the internet has revolutionised the way that people access information goes far beyond stating the obvious, yet the increasingly pervasive influence of the internet is constantly forcing companies to comprehensively re-think the way that they do business. Nowhere is this more evident than in the publishing industry. Fenton says that the internet information revolution is changing the way that the company delivers its services.

“The market itself is changing with the employment of technology. We have something called ‘open access’ which changes the underlying publishing model. At the moment the consumers of the peer reviewed article pay for the information in the articles by making a subscription to the journal. The open access says that the author should pay for the research to become public and once they’ve paid for the publishing of the article the access of that is free to everyone,” he says.

“That’s perceived as a challenge to the existing publishing model. The value that publishers and academic societies bring to the publishing is the peer review process. If there’s little distinguishing between raw research information being put on the internet and that which has gone through the peer review process, which is a quality assurance, it’s difficult to distinguish what the valuable information is from all the background noise.”

While the company acknowledges that open access is an important development in scholarly communications, Fenton believes it also represents a potential challenge to the publishing industry. It is an issue which is taxing the minds of many across government, research funding organisations, societies and publishers. “We feel the value of the published article is being diminished over time,” he explains. “There’s an increase in volume going into the domain that has been leveraging off the performance of technology. You can write an article in a word document, post it into an information repository at your university and that information is free to air.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s right. As publishers, we’ve got to increase the value we bring to the article and differentiate the free to air articles from the peer reviewed writing and also hook more context to it.” The publisher adopts a cautiously welcomes open access models that allow high quality society publishing to continue to flourish. It offers free or low cost access to libraries in the developing world, yet simultaneously aims to emphasise the value of the peer reviewed article. “Staying abreast and indeed ahead of the competition is always a challenge, but one that we’re doing well at,” says Fenton.