Reader Engagement Is Central to Author Experience

The shift from the subscription model to open access—and the corresponding shift in the parties we call customers from institutions to authors—has translated into an industry obsession with author experience: Industry conferences are chockfull of panels on engaging authors; publishers are thinking more critically about their submission systems, sometimes even investing in homegrown models à la Frontiers and Hindawi; and commercial and society publishers alike are building their organizational strategies around content acquisition, or systematic relationship management that resembles sales and marketing more so than traditional editorial.

Our data dashboards have transformed right along with us. For many of us, gone are the days of monitoring downloads per article or being singularly focused on citation metrics; instead, we pore over submissions, publications, and time-to-decision. So, in 2024, in a world where author centricity is championed as the most crucial component of competitive advantage, who cares about reader engagement?

Your authors certainly do.

Per the most recent Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey, the top three factors influencing researchers’ publication decisions were topical relevance, circulation, and academic reputation—that is, researchers want to publish in journals that are relevant to their work and are read and cited by their peers. While this US Faculty Survey excludes some response options that are typically championed as key to author experience, such as time-to-publication or the quality of prior experiences with the editorial team, surveys done by Taylor & Francis, Editage, and Springer Nature do include those factors and still echo Ithaka S+R’s results, with relevance, reputation, and readership consistently outranking time to publication, positive experience with editors, the ability to publish open access, and the quality of journal websites.

As publishers, the importance of engaging readers to adequately serve authors should come as no surprise. If you look up “academic publishing” on Wikipedia, the industry is described as a “subfield of publishing that distributes academic research and scholarship”—distribution is the name of the game. As publication volumes grow, the task of effectively disseminating the work with which researchers trust us only becomes more challenging, and the large number and varied efficacy of reader engagement strategies just increases that complexity. How do you identify strategies to cut through the noise instead of contributing to it?

While the answer to that question is far too nuanced and organizationally dependent for a  blog post to articulate, I’ve listed four recommendations below for creating a reader-engagement strategy tailored to the communities that you serve.

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