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As SME undergoes its first database management restructuring in a decade, we’ve been pushed to ask some close questions about business as usual. One of the things that has come under fire is the publication model for the society’s peer reviewed journal, Minerals & Metallurgical Processing.

Traditionally, there are two ways to sell a periodical subscription. There’s the “issue” model, in which your subscription starts the month you subscribe, and ends 12 months (or whatever your subscription arrangement promises) later. This is typical of the weekly or monthly magazine in which timeliness is the primary goal. 

The other model is the “volume” model. This is what most scholarly journals practice – the issues of a journal are paginated consecutively and they work together essentially as installments of a single, more-or-less unified body of work. The journal model makes sense for scholarly publications because it’s easier to bind and set on your library shelf and because the timeliness of the content is less critical than how the content represents a certain period within the development of your discipline. The volume model operates within a year: if you subscribe in November, you will receive the issues from January through November, plus December’s when it is ready. Your subscription expires in December, the same as if you had subscribed in January.

Naturally, the scholarly journal of M&MP has operated on the journal model.  Its audience is made up primarily of scholars, libraries and posterity. Each installment is meant to be part of a set, which can be found together in the TN section of the periodical stacks in the basement of the library, year piling upon year like the layers of a geological formation.

However, when we assessed M&MP’s needs and goals in the light of current technology, we found that the issue model made much more sense and opted to jettison 31 years of tradition. It was a difficult choice, to say the least. 

Why did we do it? The main reason was that great engine of destruction and chaos in the publishing world, the Internet. Since a subscription included instant access to all of the journal’s online archives, including the issues from the current year, a publication model that insisted on mailing out back issues and that ended at the stroke of midnight on December 31 felt increasingly anachronistic.

The other, ultimately more important, reason was that we felt the issue model more accurately reflects how people read the journal. While there may be a few hardy souls out there who still await M&MP breathlessly in their mailbox and read it cover to cover, eager for whatever news of processing may come their way, the truth is, most researchers pick and choose the articles that are most relevant to them and disregard the rest. Individual articles are passed around the Internet in PDF form (all within the bounds of copyright law, of course!) and filed by themselves in the important places on the subscribers’ hard drives. Almost no one thinks of a journal volume as a coherent body of work anymore: it is a series of pieces, some useful, some irrelevant.We wanted a publication model that reflected this view of the journal, and that would be more flexible to future changes in the publication model (such as a switch to online only.)

Will the year’s issues still be printed on paper and sent to the binder’s each year to be bound and set upon the library shelf? For the foreseeable future, yes. However, it’s time to stop thinking that this is the primary way our journal is accessed, and start thinking about how we can give the bulk of our readers the information they need, the way they want to read it.