SAGE's Blaise Simqu

Abstract

Blaise Simqu, president and CEO of SAGE Publications, has had two careers at the company, the first starting out as an editor in 1986. At the time SAGE was still known largely as a social science publisher. Simqu returned to SAGE in 1996, eventually becoming president and CEO. Since Simqu's return, SAGE has grown from just over 100 journals to some 600, moving into STM publishing. SAGE also launched SAGE Reference in 2001, SAGE Reference Online in 2007, and SAGE Research Methods Online in January. Simqu sees himself as a steward of the company, which is still owned by Sara McCune, who founded the firm in 1965 and from 1966 ran it with her late husband, George. Simqu discusses the publisher's future in an interview.

SAGE's Blaise Simqu

On the future of new ventures and old-line products

Blaise Simqu, president and CEO of SAGE Publications, has had two careers at the company, the first starting out as an editor in 1986. At the time SAGE was still known largely as a social science publisher. Simqu returned to SAGE in 1996, eventually becoming president and CEO.

Since Simqu's return, SAGE has grown from just over 100 journals to some 600, moving into STM publishing. SAGE also launched SAGE Reference in 2001, SAGE Reference Online in 2007, and SAGE Research Methods Online in January. Simqu has moved strongly into engineering and society journal publishing and has strengthened its already-existing global operations in the UK, India, and Asia.

In 2008, SAGE acquired CQ Press, which recently debuted First Street, a relational mapping tool and archive of every single Congressional staff member since the Clinton administration. Though its primary market is lobbyists, law firms, and government agencies, LJ 's Cheryl LaGuardia raved about it for public and academic libraries, too (LJ 6/1/11).

Simqu sees himself as a steward of the company, which is still owned by Sara McCune, who founded the firm in 1965 and from 1966 ran it with her late husband, George. LJ recently sat down with Simqu to discuss the company's future.

LJ : SAGE is very proud of its independence and its past. How does its history impact the present?

SIMQU: One of the things that distinguishes SAGE and is defined by the history is the future plan for SAGE. Sara McCune, who is still a very active chairperson and founder, has created an estate plan that prohibits the sale of SAGE after her death. And so the management team makes decisions differently because they are decisions on a 20- to 40-year time frame. Our plan for growing the company, our decisions about facilities--every decision we make is impacted or influenced by this estate plan.

We've noticed a number of strategic moves recently, like the acquisition of CQ Press, as well as engineering journals. How does that fit into your strategy?

SAGE had been a very dominant publisher in political science in the 60s and 70s and had published some of the leading political scientists. We had more of a monograph publishing program then. As we moved into textbook and reference publishing, however, CQ Press was a perfect fit for us because we didn't have a strong book publishing program.

When I came back to SAGE in 1996, we also moved from our social sciences base into engineering and the medical and health sciences. Now our journals are about 60 percent social sciences, 40 percent STM.

Are you out of the monograph business?

Yes. However, we still make the effort to publish important works by important scholars that are not textbooks. But it is not our primary emphasis. [As for textbooks] SAGE is primarily not at the introductory level in the curriculum, but we are at the next level above that, the 2- or 300 level and moving up into graduate school. But we do well in that space--where there are still significant courses, a prescribed curriculum, and a need for unique and innovative perspectives. We have also had some success with bundling interactive electronic versions of some of our leading textbooks. We haven't yet seen an appetite for the electronic-only textbook, but the interactive companion textbooks in a couple of cases this past year actually drove the print sales.

How do you see that developing? Will it flip at some point?

I became CEO right before my daughter started the first grade, and I remember thinking I will be successful in this position if on the day she enters college she buys an electronic textbook from SAGE and logs on to a SAGE database. She's almost in the eighth grade now, and the world is still predominantly using print. But it's inconceivable to me that a student won't [soon] be downloading their texts to a digital reader as they register for their class.

[Let's go] back to journals for a moment. We identified a dozen journals that we felt we should experiment with and move to electronic-only distribution. And we discovered instantly that their cancellation rate was significantly higher than any of our other journals. It was too soon for us to move toward print cancellation because the [library] market wants print.

That's just the opposite of what we've been hearing, since libraries can't sustain purchasing both print and electronic serials. (See "Periodicals Price Survey 2011: Under Pressure, Times Are Changing," LJ 5/1/11.)

If SAGE could stop printing all our journals tomorrow, that would be an enormous cost saving. But one of the unwritten stories in our industry is the staggering costs of the electronic--building a platform, hosting your journals, and preparing all of that content to be delivered and searched digitally--while none of the print costs have gone away.

We also experimented with an e-only version of a reference series, The Sage Reference Series on Green Society. And we had very few sales. So we printed it (and printing an encyclopedia is a commitment)--and the encyclopedia became successful.

Does the high cost of delivering electronic formats force your hand at a certain point?

We have a department now called Publishing Technologies, which did not exist ten years ago.... And the costs for that department are in the millions of dollars. Those costs don't go away. You can't have a static platform.

I can foresee getting to a decision point--maybe it's five years, maybe it's ten--in which we really don't want to print anymore. And we'll be having a philosophical argument: well, we have 672 subscribers for this journal, 80 or 90 percent of whom are accessing it online only. But there are 72 [customers] who want it in print...It becomes a customer service issue. That's going to be a painful discussion.

In light of your Reference Series on Green Society experiment, where do you see print reference going?

Wikipedia has killed introductory reference. The A-to-Z encyclopedia that you quickly would pull off the shelf just to give you a frame of reference for, say, the 100 Years War--that market is gone.

It is the next level and the levels beyond that that we think are still very important. They are gateways into academic and scientific research. They give students and researchers pathways to other literature, primary sources.

We've been hearing about the demise of the Big Deal because librarians just can't afford it anymore. Does that reflect your experience?

SAGE was actually slow to offer the Big Deal. And it was only demand from libraries or library consortia that led us to offer [it]--we had a lot of concerns about this large batch of content being delivered in one fell swoop. We couldn't foresee what impact that would have on our business. If the library community has shifted away, if there isn't the demand because the financial resources aren't available, it's their choice. One of the great values that librarians had and still have is creating a collection that is right for their institution. And in some respects, that was lost in the Big Deal.

In an interview in January, Springer's Derk Haank made some waves when he said the serials crisis had been solved in the 1990s by the Big Deal. What's your take?

I personally would never go on record saying that there was no such thing as a serials crisis, but that term has been overused or misused for three decades. There is a fundamental tension between the funding for libraries and the content they believe they require to fulfill their mission at an institution. Do I think that that tension will always exist to some degree? Yes.

At a recent strategy session, a woman in our journals publishing program put a quotation up on a slide that said, "There is a serials crisis in our industry. There has never been more pressure than now to reduce library budgets.... Publishers have to take all of this into consideration."

And then below that she slid in "1981."

We don't have unlimited budgets in life, right? So when there is a funding crisis in higher education, then, yes, the tension feels greater.

Given that we're in a recession as we were in 1981, what are you doing to control pricing?

It is an endless discussion. A lot of professional and academic societies who used to be self-published have come to SAGE. It's very hard to be a small publisher, given the demands for electronic distribution, the platform, digital archiving. And so it is difficult when we are talking to a consortium about renewing, and we have significantly more content, but it's not content that SAGE owns. It's content owned by a society, and they have expectations. We own 60 percent of our journals, 40 percent are journals that we publish under contract on behalf of professional societies, academic societies.

How does open access fit in?

We've partnered with Hindawi for a number of years to learn more about open access. But in January we launched SAGE Open targeted toward the social sciences, and it has been very successful. In the first quarter, we received more than 350 submissions. In our view, the social science community did not have a truly effective open access option.

We now know that traditional journals and open access will coexist. One is not going to replace the other, just as television didn't replace radio, and just as videos and DVDs didn't replace box office films.

But a lot of people do see streaming video as literally eradicating both DVDs and videos.

I don't want to be misunderstood. The film industry is forever different. And it is more challenging now than it ever has been because of streaming video, DVDs. But theaters still exist and box office releases still exist. The economics are completely different. The industry has changed, but the category wasn't killed. The marquee journals, the leading journals in certain scientific fields, will continue to be the leading journals. Open access journals will coexist. One will change the other, and both will change each other.

But ultimately what is the balance? 50-50? I don't know. Now, it's a tiny but growing segment that will someday be more powerful. But the journal industry is huge.