The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) is entering a new era in its publishing that will make it available online for the first time to the entire scholarly community. After dedicating over a year to researching options, the Association has decided that JAPA will be published by a major commercial publisher beginning in January 2008. The opportunities for JAPA and psychoanalysis are great. But first, a little background.
For many years, the Association has self-published JAPA through arrangements with vendors who supplied the necessary services to publish and distribute the print journal. This has enabled us to provide our members with an excellent and well-received publication, but has limited our ability to get JAPA “out into the world” so that psychoanalytic thought would register on the radar screens of those outside the psychoanalytic community.
Starting about four years ago, APsaA's director of public affairs, Dottie Jeffries, urged the Association to consider making JAPA available via an online platform. Her widely shared concern was that the Association was isolating itself from students, researchers, and anyone doing an online literature search. Additionally, as the world of scholarly journals has turned toward delivery by electronic means, libraries increasingly build their collections in electronic rather than print form. And libraries typically buy large collections of journals from publishers who represent a wide spectrum of journals. Without a robust online presence in the mainstream academic publishing arena, JAPA was in jeopardy of becoming invisible to the broader scholarly community. We felt that if we failed to enter this mainstream, the Association, JAPA, and psychoanalysis in general were missing an enormous opportunity to reach a vast audience.
As most of you know, APsaA was one of the founders and is a co-owner of PEP—one of the most exciting psychoanalytic electronic research tools ever to be developed. As we explored options for JAPA, a prime concern was to make sure that we would do nothing that might interfere with PEP's success. It quickly became clear that we did not have the publishing and online expertise to conduct a business analysis and come to conclusions on our own, so we sought the services of an expert who could guide us. Interestingly, both Steve Levy, JAPA's editor, and Nadine Levinson, one of the managing directors of PEP, recommended independent consultant, Kathey Alexander, to work with us. Her background includes over 20 years in scholarly and professional publishing, where she has been involved with books, journals, and online publishing.
After studying our current publishing structure for JAPA, its financials, and learning about PEP, Alexander suggested that the Association consider partnering with a commercial publisher that would publish JAPA in both print and online formats, and provide international marketing and sales services. An RFP (request for proposal) was developed and sent to a number of major journal publishers, who responded with great enthusiasm. It was surprising and gratifying to learn how important these publishers considered JAPA. Three publishers were invited to make personal presentations to explain their capabilities. Levy, Alexander, and I participated in these meetings, and after subsequent conversations, we made our recommendations to the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee spent a fair amount of time reviewing the case for a commercial publisher and evaluating the financial ramifications of such a decision for the Association. After considerable discussion, the Executive Committee enthusiastically endorsed the recommendation to contract with Sage Publishing for JAPA as of January 2008.
Moving the journal to Sage will provide us with a number of benefits that do not currently exist:
We will be working with a professional publishing team, highly experienced in production, online penetration, marketing, and sales.
Sage makes it their business to stay on top and at the forefront of current publishing trends, marketing techniques, and cuttingedge technological opportunities. We don't have the staff capacity to address these areas, let alone stay current with them.
JAPA will be marketed worldwide. JAPA‘s current publisher lacks the capacity to do any comprehensive marketing on JAPA‘s behalf.
JAPA citations in other journals that Sage publishes will be linked to JAPA, allowing readers of those journals to “click-through” directly to JAPA and read the article—with no delay and at no charge. Both of these factors are absolutely key, as delays and charges function as “locked gates” that the vast majority of our targeted readers won't bother to find ways to open.
Dean Stein is the executive director of APsaA.
JAPA will have a robust online presence in a way that the Association could not possibly create on its own or afford to buy. Sage utilizes HighWire, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, as its online platform. More than 850 journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and all the journals of the American Psychiatric Association as well as Psychiatric News, are hosted on HighWire, which delivers scientific and medical research online in a high-quality Web environment.
The full archive of JAPA will be available (back to volume 1, issue 1) via this platform. All APsaA member subscribers will have access to the online journal and all of its reference connections.
It is important to note that JAPA will continue to be wholly owned by the Association, and the editor will remain in control of the content. All new services, including the robust online presence, will be provided at no additional cost to members who subscribe.
We look forward to a successful relationship with Sage and we are thankful to Dottie Jeffries for her persistence in keeping this issue in front of us.