In Beverly Hills, Calif., in May 1996, a very skeptical Executive Council of the American Psychoanalytic Association agreed to the PEP business plan to join in partnership with the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. Each parent organization offered $180,000 as a loan to enter into collaboration as owners of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing, Inc., or simply PEP. This aggressive move, which turned out to be a successful endeavor, was the beginning of a new entrepreneurial business approach for APsaA. Now PEP has repaid all of its loans and is paying grants to each of the parent organizations and royalties to the journals, surpassing everyone's expectations.
The idea that eventually became transformed into the PEP Archive originated in APsaA's Committee on Scientific Activities. As early as 1992, Paul Mosher proposed the idea of a consolidated CD-ROM of the full text of psychoanalytic journals. Vann Spruiell led the first organizational attempt to produce a disc; in 1996, the project was taken over by PEP. PEP's founding directors — Peter Fonagy, Nadine Levinson, Martin Miller, Paul Mosher, Judith Schachter (later replaced by Alice Brand Bartlett), and David Tucket — contributed their expertise to the project. Together with computer consultant Neil Shapiro, the PEP board worked to develop a design with specialized templates to harness the power of Folio Views, one of the most advanced search engines available.
The database takes up more than 850 megabytes of space, filling a CD-ROM. Its ten journals are the bulletins of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, the International Review of Psycho-Analysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.
PEP has nearly 2,800 subscribers and continues to find an average of fourteen new customers a month. Stephanie Short is now coordinating PEP sales and is responsible for PEP customer service in the United States.
Photo by Brian Canty
Sales for 2001 were 25 percent greater than anticipated, but this was offset by higher-than-expected costs. These costs mainly arise from the decision to re-engineer the database and higher development costs for the addition of two new journals, Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. PEP donated $30,000 to each of its parent organizations for 2001 — $10,000 more each than PEP donated in 2000.
PEP manages its subscriptions with the Psychoanalysts Database System, originally designed by David Tuckett for the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (IJP). The system automates processing and offers efficient report generation. The database system has broad applications for any small or large psychoanalytic organization and is available for sale from IJP.
PEP has some exciting options under way for 2002 and 2003. Working with Global Village Publishing Industry, PEP has developed a Web-based product for major universities and libraries. These institutions will purchase annual subscriptions and offer Web access from library terminals only. The Web version is not an alternative for current CD users and may not provide identical functionality.
The Web project is a two-year pilot, to make sure profits justify expenses. The Web plan envisages a slow start and very gradual progress: seven customers in 2002, and then twelve per year.
At the May 2002 meetings in Philadelphia, the PEP board opted to postpone the new release of the PEP archive version 4 until June 2003. For the rest of the year PEP will focus on (1) marketing versions 2 and 3 updates to existing customers, (2) marketing the PEP Web product to large universities, and (3) stabilizing a design for the existing journals on version 4.
Work on version 4 will require PEP to find the best way to keep down the significant costs of development, digitization, design, and installation procedures. Adding new journals is costly well beyond the digitization costs; it is more complex than simply adding new update years to a stabilized database. All new material must be indexed to the PEP archive, and all of the archive has to be re-indexed to include the new journals. Nevertheless, PEP hopes to add the Annual of Psychoanalysis, the Scandinavian Journal, and some classic books to version 4, and future versions may include the Freud Standard Edition. Pre-publication sales for version 4 will probably begin in January 2003.
This year, collaborating with JAPA, APsaA, and IJP, PEP shared a publishing booth at the American Psychiatric Association meeting. A generous grant from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation helped offset the costs. Dottie Jeffries and Stephanie Short worked at the booth and demonstrated the PEP CD with assistance from Paul Mosher.
PEP has begun a program to help make discs available to places where psychoanalysis is just being developed. PEP has held preliminary discussions with the IPA to collaborate on a charitable program to finance discs for Eastern Europe and other economically depressed areas. At the May meeting, PEP had the pleasure of collaborating with the American Psychoanalytic Foundation and individual contributors solicited by Elise Snyder on behalf of Dr. Qin Wei to provide Chengdu University in China with an institutional PEP CD.
PEP plans to secure our psychoanalytic literature and scholarship in a technology that will keep psychoanalysis available for future generations.
Nadine A. Levinson, D.D.S., is president of PEP, Inc., treasurer of the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.