Building strategic partnerships is foundational for establishing yourself as an academic publisher, especially if you’re small-sized. Creating these connections improves promotional outreach and visibility, leveraging respectability and awareness surrounding your brand image.
But what exactly is a strategic partnership, and who should you enter one with as a small academic publisher? We’ll aim to answer these questions below.
What constitutes a strategic partnership?
A strategic partnership is a basis for collaboration between two or more entities (such as publishers and institutions). This partnership functions to support each party in achieving their desired goals. As such, building strategic partnerships can be critical for businesses.
Strategic partnerships are necessary because businesses often struggle when operating on their own. Entering a strategic partnership allows for resources and knowledge to be pooled, alleviating financial burdens while opening up new possibilities. Larger institutions often have a responsibility toward supporting smaller businesses and have resources specifically allocated for doing so.
Here are some of the key benefits of strategic partnerships:
- Collaboration
- Resource sharing
- Long-term commitment
- Mutual promotion
Now we know what constitutes a strategic partnership and some of the benefits of entering one, let’s see how you can go about building a strategic partnership.
Building strategic partnerships as an academic publisher
Building strategic partnerships is essential to sustain you as an academic publisher. In the same way that a tree spreads its roots through various nutrient-rich parts of the earth to sustain itself and grow, so too must academic publishers establish various networks with other sources to grow effectively.
Not every strategic partnership is destined to work. As an academic publisher, you’ll want to focus on partnerships with institutions or organizations with shared principles or audiences. Similarities in agenda mean that you can work together to support long-term goals and further increase visibility within the publishing landscape.
There are various institutions and organizations that are more beneficial than others when it comes to building strategic partnerships for small academic publishers. Let’s run through some of them.
Universities
Universities are a key strategic partnership for academic publishers. They are reputable and long-standing institutions with the resources to support many academic publishers.
A report by the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation policy highlighted the necessity of strategic partnerships in forging valuable interactions at the institutional level between universities and companies. Some of the main benefits realized by these partnerships include the development and coordination of interdisciplinary resources to address major innovation challenges; shaping of research directions; policy engagement and development of institutions; improvement of workforce skills and capabilities; and access to specialized infrastructure.
Another reason why universities make solid strategic partners for academic publishers is that they are actively involved in and connected with academic communities. Like academic publishers, they are invested in bringing easy-to-access and innovative research to those with an interest in current knowledge trends. These shared principles and audience overlap form the perfect foundation for building and maintaining an effective strategic partnership.
However, these partnerships between universities and companies face significant challenges. There are transactional, capacity, and organizational challenges that both partners will have to overcome. And of course, these challenges are often exacerbated by industry-wide developments. No strategic partnership is guaranteed in an ever-changing landscape; yet working together to ensure the longevity of the other is in the best interests of all involved.
Societies
Societies are often not-for-profit organizations that operate within specific research fields. They function to provide a platform for networking, collaboration, research specialization and dissemination, while offering supporting resources for researchers.
These organizations complement academic publishers because both are focused on building scholarly communities. Research societies can leverage their broad membership networks to support the publications or services of small academic publishers. In turn, research societies, which are often limited in their capacities, can outsource certain operations to academic publishers, such as making their journals open access.
This symbiotic relationship is not just about supporting each other operationally; it’s also about pooling together resources to sustain scholarly communities and principles on a wide scale.
Platforms
Platforms are designed to streamline the publishing process for small academic publishers and their journals, taking care of professional formatting and layout, expert proofreading and editing, and DOI registration and indexing support, etc.
JAMS is a journal management system that simplifies the manuscript submission and peer review process. Authors submit their manuscripts through a user-friendly portal, while the system checks submissions for completeness, ensuring nothing is missed. Editors can manage submissions through a centralized dashboard, streamlining tasks like inviting reviewers, tracking review progress, and making editorial decisions.
Furthermore, JAMS is built to integrate with trusted industry tools like iThenticate, Portico, ORCID, Scilit, and Crossref, ensuring compatibility with existing academic publishing workflows and standards.
In essence, small academic publishers can outsource key publishing administrative tasks to platforms like JAMS and rest assured knowing that the correct procedures are being followed.
Don’t go it alone
As a small academic publisher, your resources and visibility will be limited, especially at the beginning of your publishing journey. Streamlining your publishing process might be critical in the early stages of your journey. There are many things to keep track of, so it’s important to keep track of many things that can help your business grow.
That’s why it’s important to focus on building strategic partnerships as early as possible. These connections provide you with the resources and access to infrastructure necessary to sustain your publishing procedures. They’ll also help maximise your profitability.
Not only that, but establishing such partnerships builds respectability for your publisher’s brand. Being associated with accredited institutions is highly beneficial for your reputation within the world of academic publishing. It can ensure your audience outreach grows alongside this credibility.