 | To increase the visibility of the journal throughout the world both geographically and to different groups.
| To grow full-price subscriptions.
| To work with the SDS to increase the membership.
| To realise the potential of the internet and the developmental potential for the journal.
| To increase the citation coverage.
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The working relationship between Wiley and the Society's office has continued to be both productive and efficient, with the ongoing relationship between the various contacts within Wiley and the SDS is, without exception, very good. The system set up between the journals admin department (Sarah Stevens [email protected]) and the SDS (Roberta) for the transfer of information about renewals and new members is working well and there appear to be few, if any, queries.
In 1999 the SDS took back responsibility for producing the Membership Directory. This was a task which, for a number of reasons, Wiley was unable to carry out as well as we would have liked. The Society's office is much better placed to deliver an error-free and timely directory, and this will enable all parties to benefit.
| Published with Wiley since: 1990
| Issues per year: 4
| Circulation 1999: 946
| Major geographical split 1999: USA/W Europe/UK/Asia
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2000
Full: US$430
SDS: YS$90
Student: US$45
1999
Full: US$395
SDS: YS$80
Student: US$40
To Date 2000 (Note: still early in year)
Full: 147 (Of these 147 subscribers, 74% are "academics", 13% are corporate/industry, and 13% are "others")
SDS: 548 (446 are ordinary members; 102 are student members)
1999
205
741
Our target audience is, of course, made up of researchers, educators, consultants, and practitioners who are using system dynamics. Society membership is increasing at a very encouraging rate (57 [8%] subs gained in 1999). There were 35 SDS cancelled subs in 1999, and 15 from other institutions.
The profile (according to Wiley's records - categories slightly subjective, as it depends on how the journal subscription clerk interprets the address category) is as follows:
| 131 academics
| 222 corporate (plus a further 225 at private addresses)
| 10 governmental
| 4 medical
| 1 public sector
| 148 students
| |
At least 47% of SDS members reside at corporate and academic addresses - Wiley will target this group to encourage corporate subscription alongside membership subscription. An analysis of the directory would definitely enable further institutions to be targeted. SDS membership is clearly an attractive package for A&Cs within the field of system dynamics.
While the institutional subscription figures show 7 fewer full subs [3%] in 1999, we actually gained 8 new subscribers. The turnover can probably be accounted for by consolidation within institutions. The attached diagram shows an analysis of the reasons, if any, for cancellation across the two groups.
The forecast for academic journals in 2000 (from Blackwell's Information Service) is better than the previous year but the predicted rate of attrition still averages 5% with the US slightly higher at 6% against an average attrition of 7%-10% in 1999. Reasons include: price increases, the strength of the US dollar and of sterling, reduced library budgets and a continuing growth of consortia.
On the positive side, electronic package deals have gone down well, especially where there is free electronic access with print subscriptions. Here take up has more than doubled in the past year. There are signs that libraries are prepared to pay for key electronic content and packages, but there is also evidence that libraries are unwilling to take material for which there is no interest.
In an attempt to stop the attrition and increase the institutional subscriptions, Wiley has taken a number of measures to address the above issues:
| Price increases for institutional subscriptions in 2000 have been kept to slightly below the average of 8.9%, which compares well with the increase in pages for 2000.\
| Free electronic access is available for all institutional subscribers.
| Two additional heads have been taken on to work exclusively on our management and finance journals. Melissa Cox ([email protected]) is responsible for the marketing and promotion of SDR, and Graham Russel ([email protected]) has joined us as Digital Development Editor. Both Melissa and Graham bring extensive experience and new enthusiasm to the team, and will allow us to follow up leads and avenues to promote and market the journal, and develop further electronic initiatives.
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The membership take up of the electronic access to journal is working smoothly. With this access, subscribers are able to view full text, on line, dating back to 1996.
In the future we will be considering other developments for SDR such as:
| Addition of supplementary/supporting material
| Guidelines to authors
| Preprints (but these will require a healthy backlog of papers to justify producing them as preprints in the first place)
| |
Our thanks go to Graham Winch who continues to work hard to ensure that the Review publishes quality papers on time. Our aim is still to have at least one issue in hand at Wiley to provide a cushion and avoid delays if, for any reason there is hold-up with a paper, a copyright permission or the production process. For example, there were some difficulties during 1999 regarding the performance of production suppliers (especially the typesetter) and with maintaining a regular flow of timely manuscripts into production. The large special issue in 1999 was a challenge for all. The last issue of 1999 is printing now (January 2000), but the good news is that, at the time of writing, all of the papers for the first issue of 2000 are well into the copy-editing stage. The Production Editor who is responsible for SDR - Caroline Walmsley ([email protected]) - confirms that the press date is on time for the end of February.
In 2000 the page extent of the journal has been increased by 16% to 448pp from 384pp in 1999. This will give greater flexibility when putting issues together, especially special issues, which tend to come in significantly over length.
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)
| |
One of the criteria for maintaining the interest of A&I services is prompt publication. Indeed, as it says at the ISI's site - http://www.isinet.com/hot/essays/199701.html - Timeliness of publication is one of the most basic criteria in the evaluation process, and it is of primary importance. A journal must be publishing according to its stated frequency to be considered for initial inclusion in the ISI database. The ability to publish on time implies a healthy backlog of manuscripts essential for ongoing viability. It is not acceptable for a journal to appear chronically late, weeks or months after its cover date.
The SDS has an enhanced web presence at http://www.albany.edu/cpr/sds/, and SDR is available online at Wiley InterScience to all full-price subscribers (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/). Online access includes ALL available archival years of full text, tables of contents and abstracts at no extra charge. In addition SDS members, with their 2000 subscription will also receive access to SDR on Wiley InterScience.
| There are currently 218 members accessing SDR online.
| SDS site - Wiley InterScience links will allow guests to view abstracts and table of contents.
| Establish Wiley InterScience-SDR links out to related markets. As a first step, the SDS logo and a link to the Society's homepage have been added to the SDR homepage on Wiley InterScience.
| Look at the future possibility of making downloadable models available. We would need to establish where this material was, who owns it, and how it might best be archived and accessed. (There are some models mentioned - including several based on old SDR papers - at Tom Fiddaman's site at the following web page: http://home.earthlink.net/~tomfid/models/models.html). We are making considerable progress with the Journal of Applied Econometrics in this area, so we are aware of many of the issues.
| The final aim should be to make full model documentation available as a link from the contents page of Wiley InterScience to wherever the data is finally stored. It will be very important to allow subscribers to replicate models easily, and is an excellent example of how electronic access can offer more than the print version alone. It will also have powerful applications in the teaching of system dynamics theory.
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Wiley has played a leading role in the development of CrossRef, a reference linking service formed by the world's leading scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishers. This unprecedented collaboration allows researchers to move easily from a reference in a journal article to the content of a cited journal article, typically located on a different server and published by a different publisher. This is an objective widely accepted amongst researchers as a natural and necessary part of scientific and scholarly publishing in the digital age.
The webmasters of the following sites have all been individually e-mailed to request that they link to the Society homepage/journals homepage on Wiley InterScience:
We are pleased to report that positive responses have been received from many of these sites already.
Guest Editors: Brian Dangerfield and Carole Roberts, University of Salford
This special issue provided an ideal opportunity to target a related market in system dynamics with a tailored special issue (one time purchase £45/$75).
The special issue was advertised in the following publications:
| Journal of Forecasting
| Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
| System Research and Behavioral Science
| System Dynamics Review
| International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
| International Journal of Health Planning and Management
| Statistics in Medicine
| Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology
| International Journal of Clinical Psychology
| Health Economics, Research in Nursing and Health
| Practical Diabetes International
| |
A brochure (enclosed) was sent to 2,000 buyers of related Wiley books (systems), and within related subject healthcare areas (healthcare systems, medical statistics).
| Business and Finance Journals leaflet 35,000 copies - copy attached
| Management Science Books and Journals leaflet 18,000 copies - copy attached
| Business and Management catalogue 30,000 copies - copy attached
| Finance and Accounting catalogue - 30,000 copies - copy attached
| |
| British Academy of Management
| Decision Sciences Institute (Athens)
| ECIS (Copenhagen)
| ICIS (Charlotte)
| IFORS (Beijing)
| INFORMS
| ISF (Washington)
| OR Society - Japan
| OR Society Conference (Edinburgh)
| SMS Conference (Berlin)
| System Dynamics Society conference (New Zealand - journals sent)
| UKSS (Lincoln, UK)
| US Academy of Management
| |
Wiley is very keen to strengthen our relationship with individual members of the Society, and to make available some further attractions for potential members.
Bookclub discount scheme - Wiley would like to offer System Dynamics Society members a 20% discount scheme on all Wiley books as an additional benefit to membership. This could be established in 2000. The bookclub could be promoted to delegates in advance of the August System Dynamics Society conference.
Promotion of the 18th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society - Advertisements have been placed promoting the conference, in the following journals:
| Strategic Management Journal
| Systems Research and Behavioral Science
| Strategic Change
| Business Strategy and the Environment
| Eco-Management and Auditing
| European Environment
| International Journal of Population Geography
| Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning
| Sustainable Development
| |
These journals combined have an estimated readership of 25,000.
The conference will also be promoted on the web via Wiley InterScience, and we plan to encourage people that are already linking to the SDR homepage there to link to details of the conference as well.
| Target a list of key companies and key academic institutions that should have full subscriptions to this journal.
| 353 members are from academic institutions and corporations, Wiley will target this group to encourage institutional subscription with membership subscription.
| Environmental market - during 2000 Wiley will target environmental groups to promote membership and subscription.
| All sample copy requesters in 1999 will be re-mailed with a call to subscribe.
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During 2000 the expanded Wiley advertising team plan to target potential advertisers for SDR to gain advertising revenue.
Diane Taylor ([email protected])
2nd February 2000