Since the dawn of the digital age (remember when that sounded novel?!), concerns around keeping up with the rapid pace of change in scholarly publishing have become ubiquitous. But in recent years, it feels different.
This time, it’s not a drill.
The rise of AI and resulting changes in research development, discovery, and licensing practices, along with ongoing shifts in publication access policies, research integrity risks, and more, are reshaping the industry in real time. The question for publishers now is how to stay ahead of the curve when they’re not sure what comes next. For scholarly societies and institutions with limited resources, deciding where to concentrate their efforts can be especially challenging.
Developing a focused yet adaptable strategic plan for your publishing program is one of the best ways to gain clarity on your journals’ mission, vision, and desired market position, all of which will help you ensure you’re prioritizing what matters most in the near and long term and effectively managing risks. Strategic plans typically span three to five years and serve as a roadmap for a publishing portfolio’s priorities and the milestones to reach them.
Erin Landis, Founder and CEO of Landis Editorial Consulting, has worked with a range of society publishers to help them develop and hone their strategic plans, including the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) during her time as Vice President of Publications there, publishing organizations where she’s served as a board member, and now with her consulting clients. In the interview below, she explains why strategic planning is so important for journal programs and advises on what to cover in your next strategic planning meeting.
Many thanks to Erin for taking the time for this interview!
Q&A with Erin Landis
For publishers that have not evaluated their strategic plans in several years (or ever), where do you suggest starting?
EL: From my experience with strategic planning across different contexts, I suggest beginning with a structured planning framework to guide the process. Without that kind of roadmap, I think strategic planning can be incredibly overwhelming, especially for busy teams — and what team isn’t? Choosing a framework will help you stay on track.
For example, when I led strategic planning at AGA, I used a guide from the American Society of Association Executives on strategic planning for nonprofits. Although not specific to publishing, it still provided us with a model that would help us step back, assess where we were, and make thoughtful decisions about where we wanted the journals program to go. The process took place over several months, and it was broken into manageable exercises. We considered questions like: What is the mission of our publishing program? How well are we achieving that mission? What has changed in our specific journal disciplines, as well as the broader scholarly publishing industry? What’s changed about our organization as a whole? What do we think success will look like at the end of our strategic plan?
We also did some SWOT analysis — short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And we combined all of that information to formulate a five-year strategic plan for our journals portfolio.
Who should be involved in strategic planning for journal programs?
EL: I recommend being as inclusive as possible. Stakeholders should include publishing staff, editorial staff, editors, publications committees, and the executive leadership team for the wider organization, as applicable. For example, at a society publishing program, you might loop in association leadership to ensure you have buy-in from them. If you have a publishing partner like Elsevier or Wiley, you may want to include them in a supporting capacity, though your plan should ultimately be your own. Publishing partners can bring tremendous expertise, scale, technology, and market perspective. But societies still need to understand the issues firsthand and maintain ownership of their strategy.
In my experience, it’s usually good to start with a core strategic planning team of around three to four people. But that could be more, depending on your organization. Then you kind of fan out from there. Journals affect and contribute to many different priorities at scholarly organizations, including mission, reputation, member value, research dissemination, editorial independence, financial sustainability, and service to the field. So, including as many perspectives as possible is critical to developing a robust, comprehensive plan.
Consensus-building is critical to the success of any initiative. And that is true of strategic planning. You need buy-in from the people you expect to execute the plan. At the same time, you don’t want the process to become unwieldy or slow. That’s why having a core team driving it is so important.
How should publishers think about strategic planning across different content portfolios (e.g., journals, books, educational products)? Is it more effective to develop distinct strategies for each program, or to take an integrated approach?
EL: Probably both: each publishing program needs its own strategy, but those strategies should be grounded in a larger, organization-wide strategic direction.
In my experiences with strategic planning at different organizations, journals and educational products, and sometimes even books, sit in different departments, and the content, planning, and staff functions are often siloed. That means that if there are strategic plans for each of those programs, they’re often done separately, which generally makes sense because each program has different audiences, business models, success metrics, and market pressures. But there should be some intersection among those plans, and they should all roll up into and support the strategic plan for the publishing organization as a whole.
In the case of association publishing programs, your strategic plans for publications should support the society’s vision. The reason is that consumers of and contributors to your content don’t think of your organization in departments the way you do. They have a brand experience. So you have to think about questions like: Are you contributing to continuity across the brand? Do you have user journeys to keep scholars engaged with your content and your wider organization, from early-career learning to research publication to continuing education to professional recognition? That’s the goal. Organizations need to be intentional about the value they provide. It is not enough to have strong journals over here, strong education over there, and strong books somewhere else. The true value emerges when those pieces connect.
I realize it’s not easy to reach this ideal. The publishing department isn’t necessarily talking to the meetings department, and the meetings department isn’t necessarily talking to the education department, and so on. So, this is an aspiration to work towards. At the very least, you want to ensure that departments are not doing anything that’s either terribly overlapping or so incongruent that it doesn’t make sense.
In an ideal world, the push for individual departments to collaborate should come from the top down to cultivate a culture of cooperation. It doesn’t always happen that way, so individual teams may need to initiate these conversations. It can take some time to build cross-department relationships because people may not immediately see the need, or they may be a little bit territorial at first. So it takes patience and persistence.
What advice do you have to help publishers focus on the development areas most critical to their organization so they don’t become overwhelmed during planning or overstretch their teams during execution?
EL: I would start by acknowledging that now is an extraordinarily overwhelming time in scholarly publishing. I have been in the industry for about 25 years, and I have never seen this much change happening at once and at such a fast pace. That is especially true when we talk about AI. It is affecting almost every part of the publishing ecosystem. For many publishers, it can feel like drinking from a firehose. There are so many urgent issues competing for attention that it becomes difficult to know where to put your time, money, people, and resources.
The reality is, you cannot address everything at once. So, publishers have to be almost brutal about focus. This is where having a strategic plan specific to your journals or publishing program, but that’s tied to the overall goals of your organization, becomes incredibly helpful. Within that framework, publishers can sort issues into short-term, medium-term, and long-term priorities. And they can distinguish between what’s mission-critical and what’s an interesting opportunity. There will always be new tools and models that are worth paying attention to. But not every good idea belongs in the current strategic plan.
For example, many disciplines are dealing with an increase in paper-mill submissions right now, and with all the new tools coming out, there’s a sense of urgency to adopt them immediately. But you have to be thoughtful about it, and all of this comes down to capacity, time, and budget. All I hear over and over is that everybody is strapped for time. Piling on more process steps or initiatives because that’s what everyone is talking about isn’t always prudent.
Along those lines, strategic plans are also helpful tools to keep your team focused. If an editor has a pet project they want to work on that isn’t a priority, you can explain that it has to be tabled because it doesn’t fit in the plan, keeping feelings out of decision-making.
What are the primary challenges organizations face when trying to formulate and implement strategic plans, particularly small and mid-sized publishers?
EL: Journal publishing is operationally intense. There are always manuscripts to move through peer review, issues to publish, editors and authors to support, and so forth. Because of that, teams can become very focused on keeping things running and may not spend enough time asking larger strategic questions.
In any organization, over time, you start doing more and more things without necessarily considering the value in the context of your overarching goals. When you get to that point, and you don’t have a focus, I don’t think you can do anything particularly well. So, for me, strategic planning is about gaining clarity on where you want to go and how to get there. Part of that is identifying activities, products, or assumptions that no longer serve you. Leadership has to know when it’s time to cut things and be transparent about those decisions. When I was in charge of the publishing department at AGA, it was very important for me to be clear about why we were doing what we were doing, so everyone felt informed and part of the plan.
Once priorities are identified, the next challenge is execution. A strategic plan should not be a document that sits on a shelf. It should be a working roadmap that the team consults regularly. And, of course, things will come up that don’t neatly fit into the plan but that need to be addressed. You have to have flexibility to adjust when necessary. Ultimately, successful follow-through depends on treating strategic planning as an ongoing management process rather than a one-time exercise.
Another challenge I see is people being afraid of change, either because they’re concerned new technology will replace them or because they want to do things the way they always have. Right now, I think there’s somewhat of a lack of acceptance that AI is here to stay. It’s going to affect publishing programs, whether we like it or not, so it’s crucial to factor it into new or existing plans and develop some AI competency. Publishers do not need to chase every new technology, but they do need to stay informed, ask good questions, and be willing to experiment where it makes sense.
What role should data play in strategic planning? And how should the use of data for this purpose differ from an operational audit?
EL: A strong strategic plan should be evidence-based. Using data helps ensure that priorities are informed by measurable trends and organizational realities rather than by preferences or assumptions. At the organizations where I’ve been involved in strategic planning, grounding strategic decisions in available data helped create confidence among leadership that the proposed initiatives were not speculative, but supported by evidence. This made it easier to secure investment in the plan, including financial resources, staff time, and personnel support.
The role of data in strategic planning should differ from its role in an operational audit. Strategic planning should use data to inform long-term decision-making, whereas operational audits focus on evaluating past performance, compliance, efficiency, or adherence to procedures. To avoid conflating the two, organizations should ensure that strategic planning discussions remain future-oriented and exploratory. The goal is not to determine whether teams met operational benchmarks, but to interpret broader patterns and trends that can guide where the organization should go next.
What advice do you have to help publishers follow through on their strategic planning objectives, particularly for those that need to factor in succession planning?
EL: Many organizations invest significant effort into developing a strategic plan, but the plan loses momentum because ownership and accountability are not clearly defined after approval. When a mix of staff, editors, and leadership is directly involved in implementation, the strategic plan becomes a shared organizational effort, so it’s not tied to one or a handful of people. We used this model successfully at AGA, where designated champions helped maintain momentum and visibility around strategic priorities.
Organizations should also establish a practical system for tracking progress. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as sophisticated as dedicated strategic planning software. The key is having a centralized way to monitor objectives, timelines, milestones, dependencies, and outcomes. Equally important is establishing a regular cadence for reviewing progress. Quarterly or semiannual check-ins can help organizations identify stalled initiatives, shifting priorities, or resource gaps early enough to make adjustments before objectives fall too far behind schedule.
In many ways, strategic plans are critical for succession planning because, in the absence of a strong strategic plan, you can have anyone come in at any time and sort of derail things. I’ve seen that happen at the executive level and with new EICs. That’s not to say new ideas should not be considered and woven into your strategic plan. But because EICs and other executive officers on a board do rotate after fixed terms, having continuity really helps the program stay grounded enough to execute on the ideas set in motion before they arrived and to follow through on the new initiatives they introduced after they’ve moved on.
Strategic plans are also helpful for onboarding people. In fact, as part of AGA’s application process for new EICs, we would share an overview of our strategic plan with them and ask how they anticipated fulfilling those objectives.
As you noted, in uncertain times, organizations can become more risk-averse. How can leaders distinguish between prudent caution and missed opportunities for innovation?
EL: A well-developed strategic plan can help organizations stay grounded and focused during uncertain times while still creating space to evaluate new opportunities thoughtfully. The strategic plan provides a framework for decision-making rather than forcing leaders to react emotionally to market volatility or industry pressure.
One of the most useful functions of a strategic plan is that it helps organizations distinguish between distractions and strategically aligned opportunities. Instead of chasing every new trend, technology, or publishing model, leadership can ask: Does this opportunity align with our strategic objectives? Does it support our long-term mission and positioning? Do we have the resources to pursue it? Does it address a demonstrated market or community need?
In this sense, the strategic plan functions like a roadmap. It establishes the organization’s intended direction while still allowing flexibility to add new “stops” or initiatives along the way if they meaningfully contribute to the broader destination.
In some cases, publishers can reduce risk by piloting new initiatives, testing partnerships, or implementing phased approaches before making larger commitments. Ultimately, prudent caution should help organizations make deliberate, informed decisions. The goal is not to eliminate risk entirely, but to ensure that risks taken are strategic, mission-aligned, and evaluated within the broader context of the organization’s long-term objectives.
Thanks again to Erin for taking the time for this interview!
