How lucky we are to be working at a time of revolution!

Beim Bibliothekartag in Mannheim legte sich die internationale Verlagsgruppe Emerald Group Publishing Limited schwer ins Zeug: Sie trat mit einem großen Messestand in Erscheinung und war zugleich einer der Hauptsponsoren dieses größten europäischen Bibliothekskongresses. Emeralds Chief Executive John Peters moderierte am Donnerstag das Schwerpunktthema „Shakers and movers of information – Where do we stand internationally?“. B.I.T.online-Redakteurin Angelika Beyreuther nutzte nach der Veranstaltung die Gelegenheit, mit John Peters zu sprechen.

John Peters, Angelika Beyreuther und René Schölzel

The market in Germany is very important for us. And since we signed the national licence agreement last year, involving more than 200 institutions, this is an area where we have an increasing amount of presence. Therefore it is very important that we are here with the librarians from German universities. We want to be seen to support the library community.

Emerald works this way: we want people to use our material as much as possible; we want students and researchers to download and read articles; we want a lot of involvement, and a lot of feedback to the organisation. It is really important, having signed the licence deal, that everybody gets to know who we are and become familiar with us. As the world’s leading provider of management reasearch, it is important that people in Germany know who we are. The return we are looking for right now is simply profile, we want a higher profile, more publicity, more awareness.

I would hope that we would be at the conference next year, but I can’t really give a commitment for sponsorship at this stage.

The company was founded in 1967 as a development from Bradford University Business School. The company was originally a consulting arm, and then a small publisher coming out of a university press. Over the years it’s grown, and it separated completely from Bradford University in the early 1980s. The business now counts around 200 people, mostly based at our Bradford location, but also with representatives in the US, Australia, China, India, Malaysia and Japan. Almost all of our publishing work is based around business and management education and areas related to that.

Most businesses have what we call a supply chain. Between producer and consumer there are often a number of steps whereby value is added through the supply chain. In our industry we consider this more as a supply circle. Our suppliers are researchers, people who write for our journals and our books. They come to us for publication and our publications go to our large librarian community – and in a lot of cases go back through to our researchers. Our marketing effort is both to librarians on the one side of the triangle and back to researchers on the other side of the triangle. This is an area were Emerald is unusual and is really a leader on actually nurturing and managing relationships with authors and our research community. We regard our researchers as customers, not just suppliers. We manage relationships with them very carefully. We’ve put a lot of effort back in the research community. We run workshops for young researchers, for PhD graduates. We endow some research prizes, in association with the European Foundation for Management Developments. We also organize Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards. We really regard our research community as stake holders.

(laughs) A good journal will always get more submissions than it can possibly publish.

The people that we do not publish are just as important to us as the people that we publish because they will be authors again for us next year, or in six months’ time, with another research project. We work very hard with our editors and our review boards, to make sure that all of our authors get really good treatment. We are not overwhelmed by authors, we have a lot. I think from our journals ,we publish 6.000 papers a year, with joint authorships that’s about 10.000 authors. We deal every year with maybe 20 to 25 thousand authors in total. We all work pretty hard to make sure that everybody gets a good experience.

I found it a really exciting session. We had five presentations and drawing from some really interesting and innovative people like Mary Lee Kennedy, who is the head of knowledge resources at Harvard Business School and formerly the head of knowledge ressources of Microsoft Corporation. She is really one of the leading people in our industry, a genuine leader and a very nice person. My summary of that session? The world is changing! This is about understanding changes in technology, changes in customer demand, understanding your students as customers, understanding your faculty as customers, understanding changes in demographics, understanding the changes in behaviour as today’s teenagers are coming into the higher education market. This is the digital generation of people who have grown up with the internet, who always have known emails. The generation after them are people who have always had mobile phones, who have always known text messaging, who communicate on social network groups. This is a very different sort of information behaviour.

It’s a bit like travelling back in time. The invention of the steam engine or the invention of the spinning machine, when the industrial revolution started in Europe, or traveling further back to the invention of the printing press. These are genuine revolutions.

How lucky we are to be alive and to be working at a time of revolution, at a time of change, at a time, when historians in a hundred, or two hundred years will say, “my God, what must the year 2000 have been like!“ What a fantastic time of change! It‘s really exciting. As a publisher, some people would say, “you must be worried, this must be a threat to your business. How does information democracy, how does social networking impact on your business? Doesn’t that mess up your business model?“ Well, we can’t stand by and say we hope this change doesn’t take place. The changes are taking place. And we intend to be embracing the change, to be pleased with the challenge. I am really looking forward to solving the problem of how we work commercially in an information democratized world, how we, as a commercial publisher, work successful with the world of Wikipedia, FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube. And if I had all the answers to that, I would probably be retired by now.