Survey examines challenges for scholarly societies

Share this on social media:

A new international survey hopes to gain insight into the professional challenges facing scholarly societies across the world in the 21st century.

Aimed at top-level society executives, the survey, called 'Meeting the challenges: societies and scholarly communication', intends to address critical issues for societies about membership and publishing. The results of the survey will be published as a free white paper this autumn.

'By working with a number of international organisations we aim to ensure that we get a representative view of how societies are changing, what the critical issues are that affect them, and identify ways to improve the services that any publishing partner or membership body provides,' said Jayne Marks, vice-president of global journals business development for SAGE, which is conducting the survey. 'We’re conscious that societies in different disciplines, in different regions and of different sizes will all have distinctive requirements, and hope that the results of this survey will help to identify trends that the industry as a whole can respond to.'

In addition to SAGE, the survey is supported by the Association for Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers; the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers; the International Association for Science, Technical and Medical Publishers, and the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.

It is being conducted online and will be available until 22 September 2008. All individual responses will be kept confidential. All respondents will be able to register to receive a copy of the report when it is published.