Digital publishing and open access policies are changing the face of academic publishing, and many of the trends that develop here are likely to make their way into the larger publishing market. That’s what made news that broke earlier this year so striking: a leaked memo suggested that the American Chemical Society’s publishing wing was almost entirely abandoning print and would focus instead on digital publishing. Since then, however, the ACS said that it will continue printing “condensed” versions of its journals for the time being. To find out how this organization is approaching publishing in the digital age, we spoke with John Brandon Nordin, its VP of marketing, Web strategy, and innovation.
Nordin pointed out that the ACS has a somewhat different mandate from that of a for-profit publishing house. “Our charter is to help advance the scientific record, and advance science itself,” Nordin said. That involves a significant amount of publishing—”In that role, we publish 34-plus journals, and have a century of publishing heritage”—but the focus is primarily on serving the academic community.
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