Print vs. Online Publication: ABCT Shares their Challenges and Solutions

October 15, 2010 - Susan Henninger
By Susan Henninger

Many organizations today find themselves evaluating whether they should take their publications online, keep them in print, or find a combination of the two venues that suits both their members or clients and their Boards of Directors.

David Teisler, CAE, Director of Communications for the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) in New York City, advises businesses and organizations to, “Think about what it is that you want as your end outcome and everything else will flow from that,” adding, “Take the time to learn as much as you can before you begin to make decisions!”

In ABCT’s case, Teisler explains that they put their two journals online six years ago and added PDFs of their newsletter slightly afterwards. However, the organization members and committees had actually started to consider this move several years beforehand.

“We saw that the world was changing and at the same time we noticed that many of the things we used to consider products had morphed into services,” recalls Teisler. Using ABCT’s fact sheets as an example, he elaborates, “We used to sell the sheets but when we realized that our ultimate goal was to drive traffic to our website, our purpose shifted from creating a small revenue stream from the sale of the sheets to increasing information dissemination by making the sheets readily available at no cost to our members so they could then share them with their clients.” Teisler adds that if companies want to be relevant in today’s world, they need to be able to understand and take advantage of the online universe and all it can offer.

Teisler describes the newsletter conversion process as easy and low-cost because ABCT simply had their printer create a PDF when he printed their newsletter. Conversely, transitioning their print journals online was an immense undertaking. Since the group wasn’t even sure where to begin the process, Teisler and his associates spent a significant amount of time researching the pros and cons of going online with their written materials and trying to discern who would be best able to create the text and platform that they wanted for ABCT. Teisler asserts that this was a crucial step because, “You really need to know your options and who the players are.” Their research group was diverse, made up of stakeholders that included members from their finance and publication committees, editors, and their Board of Directors, and they took many factors into consideration including:
  • The various costs of the options
  • How to come up with a consistent format for their Request for Proposals so submissions would be easier to compare and evaluate
  • The opinions of other societies, authors, and editors
  • Whether they should give up their rights and sell their journals to a publisher or form a partnership in which they could retain their rights
ABCT ultimately decided on a combination of print and online newsletters. They put their newsletter online in static (not dynamic or searchable) PDF files while continuing to mail them to their members because both Teisler and his boss, Executive Director M.J. Eimer, believe that “It’s essential for an association to demonstrate its continued relevance and to do this it has to visit you in a personal, physical form other than a dues notice or a call to action.” Teisler feels this approach has been optimal for ABCT because they discovered that, despite numerous and diverse online reminders to their members such as email blasts, “There are still a lot of people out there who don’t realize that our publications are now online.”

For the journals, ABCT used what Teisler calls “a true online conversion”, meaning they put them online as web pages (not PDFs) through a professional publisher, for the following reasons:
  • This is the direction in which the scientific publishing world is moving.
  • Researchers depend upon online access to find references for their articles which will then lead to citations for your publications’ articles so; if you want your publication to be relevant then it must be easily accessible online.
“It’s the impact factor that helps drive perceived relevance in the scientific community,” he elaborates. “The impact factor is determined by the number of times that your articles are cited in a given period. The more you can get your important articles out in front of other researchers so they can choose to cite them in their own articles, the greater the impact. The greater the impact, the more other authors will want to submit to your journals and the more librarians will want to keep your publications on their subscription list.” Ultimately this “domino effect” should lead to more recognition of, and revenue for, your organization.

Teisler has two valuable tips from ABCT’s experience with online conversion to share with readers:
  • You should assume that submission and management software that the publisher uses will be different than what you use which means you’ll need to retrain your editors and production people.
  • Most large publishers have cookie-cutter templates so if you like the way your publication looks and favor its editorial style and guidelines then you must be sure to write in your contract that the new publisher will need to accommodate your existing templates.
Though finances needed to be an element in their final decision, organizational values turned out to be more important. According to Teisler, “We looked toward the future and realized that we wanted to be in alignment with other essential psychological journals as well as to retain the look and feel of our publications and that premise was what we based our final decisions on.”