You are viewing the results of a multiyear strategic process, which began with a simple question: How can we achieve the best future for ESA publications?
ESA's publishing efforts are vital to our success as a scientific society. Our journals serve as a critical element of the scientific process and the ecosystem of the discipline of entomology. Further, our publications support ESA's core values by providing development opportunities for all members. On a financial level, revenue from ESA's publishing arm makes many other society activities and member services possible.
Although ESA has more than a century of success in journal publishing, the environment is changing in ways that create significant challenges for scientific societies. U.S. institutional library budgets are extremely tight and have been that way for years, creating fierce competition among publishers. Growth opportunities are available outside of the United States, but effective outreach requires a local presence and a deep understanding of local culture. In addition, the technology behind journal publishing is changing rapidly. ESA authors deserve access to the best technological support, but it is difficult for a small publisher to constantly invest in new systems.
In 2012, ESA began a comprehensive strategic review of its publishing operations. We considered what our future would look like as an independent publisher, and we considered what our future could look like with a publishing partner. At the end of this review and after an in-depth proposal process, ESA found the ideal publisher to work with us to promote and elevate the entomological sciences: Oxford University Press.
Oxford University Press, a department of the University of Oxford, provides the scale and global reach of large commercial publishers combined with a scholarship-friendly approach that comes from being governed by fellow academics. Its mission, to support excellence in research, scholarship, and education, dovetails perfectly with ESA's mission to promote opportunities for entomologists and enable them to share their science globally.
Through our partnership with Oxford, ESA has been able to offer immediate benefits to its members and authors. ESA members no longer pay page charges in ESA's subscription journals. For our open-access journals, ESA members enjoy significant discounts on publication fees. All authors will receive free PDFs of their articles upon publication for their own personal use. You can share these PDFs with colleagues and students as needed. Oxford has also upgraded ESA's publishing systems. We are transitioning to ScholarOne's Manuscript Central system for manuscript submission and tracking. Our journal content is now hosted through the Highwire platform. In addition to the individual journal websites, Oxford has created a central publications portal for ESA, where users can search across all ESA journal content—making our authors' work significantly more discoverable and researchers' work easier.
The new publications portal is one aspect of Oxford's larger commitment to increasing the visibility of ESA authors' work. Oxford supports a large and comprehensive marketing team whose focus is on raising awareness of journal content. From traditional media outreach to Twitter and Tumblr and everything in between, the Oxford team will partner closely with ESA to promote our journal content.
The partnership between ESA and Oxford was made possible through the hard work and dedication of the ESA Governing Board and staff. I would especially like to thank my predecessors, Frank Zalom and Robert Wiedenmann, whose leadership and innovative spirit were critical to the success of this process. I would also like to thank Alan Kalian, ESA's now-retired director of publications, whose deep understanding of ESA's publications built the foundation for our future plans.
Welcome to the new partnership between ESA and Oxford University Press. We look forward to building on our organizations' history to the benefit of our society and the discipline of entomology.
