 |
 |
|
|
In a major initiative of APA Medical Director Steven M. Mirin, M.D., the extensive publication operations of both APA and American Psychiatric Press Inc. (APPI) are about to be reorganized in an effort to streamline them and position them far better in cyberspace.
The publishing initiative will integrate APA and APPI business functions and make them much more efficient by eliminating duplicative functions and lowering expenses through economies of scale. Among the functions that will be affected are pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical advertising sales, publication support services such as print buying, circulation and marketing, and technical aspects of electronic publishing.
Despite merging the business functions into a new entity, editorial operations will continue to be distinct and reside in their current homes.
The plan that APPI's Board of Directors endorsed on February 6 and APA's Board of Trustees approved on March 20 will place the two groups' business operations under a new umbrella office called the Office of Publishing Operations, whose director will answer to both the APA medical director and the APPI chief operating officer, Mirin explained.
The director of the new office is to be given broad authority to reshape and merge the publications' noneditorial operations. Within the individual's purview will be formulating plans to combine APA and APPI resources, personnel and staffing decisions, and realign existing departments in the two organizations.
Another new entity in the publishing division will be the Publication Oversight Group, which will provide input to and receive input from the director of publishing operations on business and fiscal issues related to APA publishing efforts. The membership of the oversight group will consist of the editors of Psychiatric News, American Journal of Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Services, as will as APPI's CEO/editor-in-chief, the director of APA's Office of Research, and the APA medical director.
Mirin anticipates that the reorganization will allow significant growth in the publications program from expanded subscriber bases, cross-marketing opportunities, and cost reductions once mailings are combined and overlapping promotional efforts eliminated.
With APPI having no staff specifically assigned to marketing its journals, those publications could benefit considerably by being folded into the existing sales programs that market APA's periodicals. This will also facilitate the ability of the journals to share advertising materials with each other and coordinate billing databases. To date, APPI's journals, with their lower subscriber bases and the absence of staff selling advertising space in them, have found it difficult to attract pharmaceutical advertisers, Mirin said.
Cost efficiencies are not an insignificant consideration in the restructuring plan. For example, while all of APA's and APPI's journals are printed by the same company, the organizations have negotiated separate printing contracts. Bundling the journals into one large-volume contract would attract more competitive bidding and is thus likely to lead to slashed printing costs, Mirin noted. APA's vast array of specialized newsletters and its annual meeting publications might also benefit from this type of printing consolidation if included within the purview of the new entity.
Coupled with eventual savings from staff salary and benefit costs resulting from anticipated vacancies and freezing current position vacancies, APA could eventually realize savings "in excess of $200,000 per year," perhaps as soon as one year after the plan is fully implemented.
The rapidly advancing world of electronic publishing was also part of the reorganization plan Mirin described for the Board.
"APA and APPI must move beyond the written word and static images," he said in his report. They "must develop new, creative plans for electronic products and services that will assist member in their professional lives, provide information to the public, and expand APA's marketing of products and services."
He offered several proposals, all endorsed by the Trustees, to smooth the transition to increased electronic publishing. These include centralizing all electronic publishing initiatives in the new Office of Publishing Operations; assessing every APA publication for suitability for conversion to an electronic format; converting all publication production activities to a single format; ensuring that all new software databases can be integrated with World Wide Web technology; exploring the development of online versions of all journals, current and future, and including text that did not appear in their print versions; expanding CD-ROM products geared to the public and to APA members; developing an expanded Web version of Psychiatric News; and including CME courses in the electronic publishing offerings.
A major step in the effort to boost APA's visibility in cyberspace will be an agreement with Stanford University's HighWire Press to develop and maintain APA/APPI periodicals online. The initial cost for putting the APA/APPI journals online is about $156,000, noted APPI Chief Operating Officer Ronald McMillen. This cost, includes archiving these journals online back to January 1996. After the initial year annual costs should be about $120,000. Some of the cost will be offset by increased advertising revenues once the journals are more visible and accessible and fees paid by libraries, hospitals, managed care companies, or other large institutions for licenses to access the journal sites.