Why Having

Independent Partners Matters

 

We at Silverchair recently announced that

we have received a significant growth investment from our new capital partner

(Thomson Street Capital Partners) to help us continue to scale our business and

offer even more valuable products and services to learned and professional

society publishers (i.e. the LPSP of ALPSP).

 

One of the crucial and most desirable aspects

of the investment is that enables Silverchair to remain an independent,

non-conflicted partner for society publishers. The feedback of the society publishers

in our community has been resoundingly positive, as the investment is designed

to increase the breadth of products and services available to them as well as

attract additional society publishers into their community—with our ultimate

goal of assembling and supporting a strong, sustainable community of

independent publishers who can leverage Silverchair’s services and their peers’

knowledge and experience to react and thrive together as industry conditions change.

 

ITHAKA’s Roger C. Schonfeld recently

provided his (independent) analysis of the TCSP investment in Silverchair in

SSP’s Scholarly Kitchen blog, under the title of “Keeping

Publishing Infrastructure Independent,” noting that “Silverchair remains

vital infrastructure for some 400 scholarly publishers, which can feel a sense

of relief that it remains independent.”

 

But Why Does the Independence of Your Key

Partners Matter?

 

 

As our President Will Schweitzer says (a

lot), “Our top priority is to support our customers’ top priorities—in

everything we do we must help publishers make money, save money, and best

achieve their missions.” 

 

Maintaining independence allows Silverchair

to avoid 1) conflict of interest or 2) conflict of priorities with

our independent society customers. To expand on these two types of conflict:

 

1.    

Many forms of partner conflict

of interest are obvious – such as using platforms or services from a

publisher that also publishes journals in your field and thus competes for finite

authors, manuscripts, OA dollars, and subscription dollars. It is questionable

how these partners can fulfill their legal responsibilities to their shareholders

and yet also put society interests ahead of their own in the long run. However,

there are legal structures and financial constructs that societies can use to

try to identify and control for these obvious conflicts, so they can be seen as

at least somewhat manageable.

 

2.    

A partner’s conflict of

priorities are less obvious (and more dangerous). An owner can put their

own product development priorities above that of their customers’ needs when determining

their forward roadmap or can cut back partner-facing resources, such as account

management or client services. They can slow down the pace of product

development in one area in order to refocus resources to other technology

platforms (especially if they are a large organization with a variety of

platforms). They can gather and use data about your submissions, authors, and

registered readers to further their own author recruitment and sales. They can

throttle support services to customers in order to have more staff to pursue

these other strategies, which can disrupt operations or delay a society’s own

product development plans. Crucially, these conflicts of priorities are not

easy to name and control for in legal/financial terms, and thus the society may

have little recourse if partner priority conflict worsens mid-relationship.

(Worse, these examples are all drawn from real experiences society

publishers have shared with us.)

 

This is why Silverchair puts such emphasis

on our independence. We serve no other corporate parent or funder strategies. We

run an open roadmap so that all of our customers can watch in real time (and

have meaningful input into) the priorities and development of our platform. We

succeed in the long run only if our society customers succeed in the

long run, and so we are laser-focused on making that happen.

 

Silverchair believes that thriving,

independent society publishers are an essential component of an optimal

scholarly publishing future, and the lack (or diminishment) of these publishers

would be a huge loss for researchers, professionals, and science writ large in

society.

 

Independence matters – for you and

your partners.

 

Want to learn more about our plans? Jake

and other members of the Silverchair team are excited to be attending the ALPSP

meeting and would love to set up a time to chat. Get in touch: jakez@silverchair.com.

 

Jake Zarnegar

 

Chief Business Development Officer

 

Silverchair

 

jakez@silverchair.com