Publisher's Report

· To increase the visibility of the journal throughout the world both geographically and to different groups.

· To increase usage of the journal; and to grow revenue through subscriptions, licences and individual pay-per-view.

· To realize the potential of the internet and the developmental potential for the journal.

§ Online usage statistics (see later in this report). We hope the information provided is interesting and that it will be of use to the Society and the editor in their planning and development of the journal. Feedback on the statistics is always appreciated.

§ Online repository for models, simulations and datasets: once the repository is set up (with, say, a supportive university server) and it is populated – we will link available models, methods, or datasets linked from the online abstracts of papers themselves. This will not only allow easy navigation, but would enable guest users to appreciate even more the value of getting a subscription or joining the SDS.

Major geographical split 2002 (excluding SDS members): Western Europe / USA / Asia / UK / Japan

Our target audience is made up of researchers, educators, consultants, and practitioners who are using system dynamics.

Society membership appears to have increased by nearly 5% during 2000, over 7% in 2001, and 5% in 2002, all of which is consistently excellent.Indeed, we seem currently to be running ahead of this point last year by more than 6%. SDS membership clearly remains an attractive package for people working or researching within the field of system dynamics.

In order to stay customer facing in the rapidly transitioning journals business we have been actively developing several different delivery options for our journal users. Unfortunately for the purposes of this report, this means that it is no longer possible to assess the health of a journal simply by looking at the number of print subscriptions year on year.

There are still traditional print subscriptions, of course; but in addition we also have print subs combined with an electronic basic access licence (BAL); enhanced access licences (EALs); and there is also the ability for EAL-holding libraries to purchase access to individual articles from any Wiley online journal to which they do not already subscribe (via our "ArticleSelect" tokens).

Wiley's pro-active sales team continue to approach key institutions with bespoke Enhanced Access Licences (EALs) based around the idea of multi-user and multi-site access. During 2000, we sold 9 of these; in 2001 we sold 28 EALs, and 44 were sold in 2002. So far in 2003 we have already increased this to 45 EALs.

In addition, many libraries are now part of academic consortia. Some institutions have elected to receive our journals as an online product only, and pay us their subscription via their EAL profile. (Just at present, we cannot confirm that these subs are all appearing in any reported numbers. We hope to resolve this over the next few weeks.)

The latest development is "access to individual articles" which has recently become available on a pay-per-view basis. The first two articles accessed in this way for SDR were:

Opportunities and pitfalls related to e-commerce strategies in small-medium firms: a system dynamics approach (Vol. 18, No. 3)

A dynamic model of work quality in a government oversight organization (Vol. 18, No. 4)

This works for anyone visiting Wiley InterScience whether they subscribe to any other journal or not. (Any Wiley InterScience journal article can be purchased for $25 per article for access limited to 24 hours. We can immediately see there is an opportunity here to suggest to any regular downloaders of SDR material that they would be better off joining the Society instead.)

All of this can make the number of subscriptions appear to reduce - yet we may find we are maintaining the actual income we receive. At the same time, enhanced access licences are enabling more people than ever before to read the journal: multiple users can access the journal simultaneously, across multiple sites at that university.

Major e-licensing deals - such as the one Wiley have entered into with library-supplier ProQuest [see box below] for all Wiley business, finance and management journals - are also making sure that we can reach more "information consumers" with the journal than ever before.

PROQUEST DEAL

This major aggregator of reference material for (non-academic) libraries signed with Wiley in 2002 to take all 40 Wiley business, finance, and management journals (the Wiley BoldIdeas collection).

ProQuest will make the full text of SDR available to their subscribers - starting with last year's issues but on a time-lag basis. (They will not be able to distribute anything until it has been published for at least six months.)

For Year One of the deal, ProQuest have paid an advance royalty fee split evenly across all 40 journals. In future, royalties earned will be split on the basis of actual usage.

As SDR has a slightly better than average profile for journals within the collection, we will expect it to out-perform many of the other titles and qualify for a larger share of next year's royalty payment.

SDR 's inclusion in the ProQuest collection will undoubtedly bring the journal to the attention of new readers and enable more people to access - and cite - the research that is published.

Abstracting and indexing

SDR is currently covered by the following abstracting and indexing services:

Computing Reviews, Current Contents/Social and Behavioural Sciences (ISI), Fluidex (Elsevier), Geographical Abstracts: Human Geography (Elsevier), INSPEC, International Abstracts in Operations Research, Psychological Abstracts/PsycINFO, Research Alert (ISI), Social Sciences Citation Index (ISI), Social SciSearch (ISI).

Impact factor figures for 2002 from the ISI are now available. Although we saw an improvement in SDR's impact factor in 2001 to 0.588 from 0.455 in 2000, the figures for 2002 show a fall back to 0.455 again.

We will continue to look for ways to improve the citation coverage again, and any additional suggestions for coverage are always welcome.

Production

John McCarty – Senior Production Editor for SDR - confirms that the journal is publishing to schedule and within budget. Issues 1 and 2 have been published, and copy is now in for 19:3 (due to publish 8 September 03). Copy deadline for 19:4 is 3 October 03.

As well as Articles, the journal is also now carrying Book Reviews and Readers’ Letters/Replies.

Ideally, it would be good to have copy-in-hand for the journal (at least one issue’s- worth) as a safeguard against possible schedule slippage, if for some reason there were delays with papers already accepted (e.g. artwork problems, copyright transfer agreement, permissions).

At present, papers appearing in SDR are not being posted in Wiley InterScience as EarlyView articles, since by the time authors’ corrected proofs are received it is necessary to go to press with that particular issue. Again, having a reasonable backlog of material would help here – perhaps something to be considered for 2004.

INTERNET/ELECTRONIC PRESENCE ENHANCEMENT

SDR is available online at Wiley InterScience to subscribers with appropriate access status. Archival years of full text go back to 1997 with (abstracts also available for 1996). In addition SDS members, with their 2003 subscription, also receive access to SDR on Wiley InterScience.

· The membership take up of electronic access to the journal is working very smoothly.There are currently 694 members accessing SDR online. This is up nearly 23% on the 566 members who had arranged access by this time last year. July 2002, and more than double the figure of 320 reported in July 2001. This is very encouraging. (The membership take up of electronic access is probably the most widespread that Wiley have with any society journal.)

· As mentioned above, we are keen to see the addition of links to supplementary material from the SDR homepage, and especially the possibility of making downloadable models available. The plans underway for making full model documentation available as a link from the online SDR to a data archive will certainly add an extra new dimension to the journal online.Giving users the opportunity to replicate models easily is an excellent example of how electronic access can offer more than the print version alone. This will undoubtedly also have powerful applications in the teaching of system dynamics theory.

As mentioned above, EarlyView could go live whenever required. In the meantime, any registered Wiley InterScience user may now sign up for ContentAlerts andreceive, via email, a hyperlinked table of contents for the most recent issue of any Wiley InterScience journal including SDR. These emails are generated as soon as a full issue is published in Wiley InterScience. Users do not even need to be subscribers to sign up for ContentAlerts, although access to the full text is, of course, limited to subscribers or those going through the pay-per-view route. To get started, you need only to select the "Add Alert" button on the Available Issues page for SDR; you can manage your list of alerts from your personal home page on Wiley InterScience (which you set up by registering). We would urge all involved with the journal to register for these alerts, and we would be happy to provide more detailed instructions on how to register for them if required.

A sample copy of the journal (the same as that used for print sample copy distribution) is available online and can be viewed free of charge, via Wiley InterScience.

There are some very interesting new internal reports on SDR online usage via Wiley InterScience now available.

· 46,000 online Tables of Contents of SDR looked at (up from 29,800 in 2001, and 16,300 in 2000)

· nearly 27,000 online PDFs of articles looked at (up from 16,000 in 2001, and 4,800 in 2000)

(*Basically this means they either had no subscription to the full-text version, or their institution didn't have enough concurrent-user subscriptions.)

As an aid to seeing which particular papers from SDR are being downloaded, we have prepared a report of the top 100 articles downloaded (attached separately) between January 2002 and June 2003, which is made available to the meeting on a confidential basis.

We would like to propose to the Society that we put a new highlight on the Wiley InterScience homepage for SDR that would list the top, say, five most-accessed papers in 2002 as a hypertext-linked feature. (It is interesting to note, by the way, that these are actually a slightly different set from the top five over the period January 2002 and June 2003 mentioned above.)

This top five would not show the actual number of downloads (which would remain company confidential) but would allow visitors to the site to perhaps gauge a quick appreciation on what had recently been most popular with other people.

1. Rerum cognoscere causas: Part II - Opportunities generated by the agency/structure debate and suggestions for clarifying the social theoretic position of system dynamics (Vol. 17, No. 4)

2. Strategic management of complex projects: a case study using system dynamics (Vol. 17, No. 3)

3. Cycles in the sky: understanding and managing business cycles in the airline market (Vol. 17, No. 4)

5. Qualitative and quantitative modelling in system dynamics: some research questions (Vol. 16, No. 3)

Background and 2002/3 Roundup

Despite a reduction in impact factor the increase in citations indicated healthy growth. The journal was heavily promoted alongside Competitive Strategy Dynamics by Kim Warren, and featured in a leaflet promoting Wiley Information Systems titles. In addition it was represented at all key events in the field, including ECIS, ICIS, INFORMS, The OR Society, SMS, BAM, and the US Academy of Management. In a new initiative, Wiley attended the annual meeting of the UK Chapter of the Society for the first time, and there was a major initiative featuring promotional bookmarks at the main Society conference.

2003/4 promises much, with major new marketing areas to consider and revenue streams to grow. Leading the way is our Pay-Per-View service, allowing non-subscribers to purchase single articles online. As we continue to shift away from subscriber numbers towards usage as the key indicator of success, this service will increase in importance. Our EarlyView service is available, and cross-marketing activity will increase, particularly via email. Alongside all this the foundation stones remain firmly in place – SDR will feature in all key Strategy and Management Science promotions through the year, and will continue to form a crucial part of the prestigious online body of knowledge presented by Wiley Interscience.

MARKETING PLANS

In 2002, nearly three million users were denied access to journal articles because they were not covered by a license. Pay-per-view allows these users to simply click and purchase. The first article sold within five minutes of going live! From a marketing perspective, this major new service will allow us to operate in unprecedented ways:

· Promotion of key backlist articles

2. The System Dynamics Society

Wiley has been invited to sponsor publication of the proceedings for the SDS Conference in Oxford in 2004. We would like to confirm our agreement to this request and will make the necessary arrangements with the SDS. It is understood that the SDS will provide Wiley with final PDF files of the proceedings that we will print from. Wiley will work with the SDS to ensure that the files are provided to our specification. We will proceed direct to print from the submitted files.

We are keen to continue strengthening our relationship with individual members of the Society, and will maintain the 15% discount scheme on all our business books that we set in place last year (bookmarks promoting this have been sent to the 2003 conference and an advertisement placed in the conference literature). This is an attractive benefit for Society members.

We will continue to seek new ways of adding value to Society membership through our publishing programmes and marketing activity.

Regional Chapters

In February 2003 Wiley attended the annual meeting of the UK regional Chapter of the Society in Harrogate. SDR and a selection of books were exhibited at Harrogate. We would like to investigate ways in which we can leverage the annual meetings of the other regional Chapters around the world, and aim to establish an ongoing infrastructure for regular cooperation in the future.

Across subjects

System Dynamics as a discipline cuts across many fields Although the marketing of SDR is managed from within our Business group, we will ensure that it is included in all appropriate mailings and promotions from other relevant subject groups, for instance Finance and Environmental Science.

With Wiley books

We will be publishing several books in the coming year with direct relevance to SDR, and will ensure that we capitalise on any opportunities to cross-promote between our book and journal audiences. For instance, wherever possible we will aim to advertise the journal in the endpapers of relevant books.

In today’s climate of declining subscriptions, the acquisition of a ‘body of knowledge’ is often more attractive to customers than subscription to a single journal. We will continue to market SDR in this way, leveraging aggregators and consortia wherever possible to increase usage.

SDR will feature in the following major promotions:

Management and Strategy Catalogue 2003

This catalogue is our flagship mailing piece for the year in the area of Management and Strategy, and will mail to 20,000 managers and general businesspeople in August. We will support it with targeted advertising and email blasts to in-house and purchased lists.

High-Level Strategy Campaign

SDR will also be an important component of this smaller, more focused leaflet reaching 5,000 senior managers and planners in late September. Again, we will be support the promotion with targeted advertising and email blasts to internal and external lists.

Preceding the main 2004, this update of the Management and Strategy Catalogue will ensure that SDR is kept at the forefront of our customers’ minds throughout the year. It will mail in early spring.

5. Conferences and exhibitions

We will promote SDR at all relevant events we attend through the year, and make efforts to promote at further events via leaflet insertions. Sample issues of the journal will continue to form the basis of this promotion, but with renewed emphasis on registering with Interscience to view the sample issue online.

6. Part of BoldIdeas™ - Wiley's online business journals collection

· Allows corporate and institutional customers to license collections of Wiley business and finance journals

· Continued global marketing push including advertising, mailing, email alerting

Whenever we have features or news relating to SDR, we will inform our audience of business book and journal buyers. For instance we can announce forthcoming Special Issues ahead of time to targeted audiences, or provide extra ‘buzz’ promotion for highly-cited or well-reviewed articles (see the ‘Pay-Per-View’ section above). Further opportunistic activity will take place as appropriate.

The SDS has requested that Wiley provide 25 copies of a complete volume (i.e. 4 issues) free of charge for distribution to students in India. This has yet to happen but Wiley agrees with this request. We would like to ensure that these copies are given direct to students and not faculty members or academic institutions.

Price	Full	SDS	SDS Student
2003	$530	$90	$45
2002	$495	$90	$45
2001	$465	$90	$45
2000	$430	$90	$45
1999	$395	$80	$40

Subscriptions	SDS	Enhanced Access Licences (EALs)
To date 2003	857*	45
At end 2002	884	41
At end 2001	842	28
At end 2000	779	9

Abstracting and indexing

SDR is currently covered by the following abstracting and indexing services:

Production

INTERNET/ELECTRONIC PRESENCE ENHANCEMENT

Background and 2002/3 Roundup

MARKETING PLANS

· Promotion of key backlist articles

2. The System Dynamics Society

Regional Chapters

Across subjects

With Wiley books

SDR will feature in the following major promotions:

Management and Strategy Catalogue 2003

This catalogue is our flagship mailing piece for the year in the area of Management and Strategy, and will mail to 20,000 managers and general businesspeople in August. We will support it with targeted advertising and email blasts to in-house and purchased lists.

High-Level Strategy Campaign

SDR will also be an important component of this smaller, more focused leaflet reaching 5,000 senior managers and planners in late September. Again, we will be support the promotion with targeted advertising and email blasts to internal and external lists.

5. Conferences and exhibitions

6. Part of BoldIdeas™ - Wiley's online business journals collection