> Hey Chuck0,
>
> You feel like detailing this out a little? I'd be interested. Not so
> much the personal but the economic and institutional reasons for
> cutting jobs at Science. Well, the personal if you feel like it.
It's funny, because I had told somebody several months ago that the possibility of layoffs at AAAS was nearly nil for the first part of this year. Then I'm the first one in my department to be sent packing.
I won't get into the personal reasons, but my boss was looking for some fresh blood. I don't blame him--I was there for 4 1/2 years, a lifetime in webmaster years--but his actions really smacked of a person who has an MBA and goes through the motions when crisis starts to hit. One of the things he's looking for is a webmaster with marketing skills. That's marketing skills on paper. He doesn't know that I already run several successful websites (Infoshop.org gets 2.5 million hits a month now) and have a growing band of enthusiatic supporters. The fans of my website have been know to include the URL in their sig files and others have marked the URL on subway platforms.
AAAS is a unique association among professional associations. It used to be THE association for scientists to belong to, but that has changed over the past 20 years. These days, scientists belong to the association that most closely matches their discipline, say IEEE or the American Chemical Society (ACS). AAAS is called a "second membership" association, which means that scientists will join the association if they have the money to do so after joining their primary association. AAAS membership growth has been stagnant for years and started heading south soon after Science started offering institutional site licenses. More on that in a minute.
The primary reason why scientists join AAAS is to get a subscription to Science, which is the premiere multi-disciplinary scientific magazine in the United States. Even though scientists have to spend extra money above the cost of the magazine to join the association, the subscription cost is still cheaper than most STM (Science, Technical, Medicine) magazines. But AAAS as a membership organization plays second fiddle to AAAS the publisher of Science. It's funny, because when I told people I worked for AAAS I got blank stares. When I said I worked for Science, their faces lit up. So, when you've sunk all of your eggs in the publishing basket, you start losing eggs when the magazine market starts to change. Especially when new technology like the Internet comes along.
The shit started hitting that fan last summer when the circulation figures for Science dropped below 150,000 for the first time in many years. Science was bringing in plenty of money from advertisers--this success paid me a nice bonus before Christmas--but this drop in circulation put Science in danger of falling below its rate base. A rate base is a circulation number that a magazine uses to charge advertising rates to advertisers. If the advertisers discover on a magazine's audit report that circulation has dropped below a certain number, they can start demanding lower rates. Needless to say, this can be disastrous for a large magazine with a mutlimillion dollar operating budget. Science only flirted with this disaster briefly, but it still looms like that iceberg off the bow of the ship.
Why was circulation dropping? For numerous reasons, the most important being the loss of members after sitewide access to Science magazine was instituted. Libraries clamored for one stop access to Science for their entire campuses and AAAS came up with a site license option several years ago. Science's competitor, Nature, is still dragging its heels on this, for good reasons. AAAS made a bunch of money off of site licenses and earned the respect of librarians, but it started losing members. These were the scientists who decided that getting a paper copy of Science wasn't worth it and they weren't excited about being a member of AAAS. So they got access to Science via their institution's site license. This isn't good as far as a membership association was concerned, especially one managed by folks who were quite conservative and traditional about what needed to be done. This situation caused a lot of stress in our office and probably contributed to the AAAS board asking our CEO to retire.
But in many ways, this was out of their control. Aside from AAAS's stupidity about clinging to the idea that it was a publisher first and membership organziation second, it was the Internet that changed everything. On one hand, there was the belief by many Internet users that information should be free. While I share that belief, I think that many are naive about the costs involved in putting issues of a magazine online. The librarians were especially naive. They were asking for cheap access to the online issues, thinking that it was all just a matter of automatically converting files to HTML. Librarians have also pioneered the idea of Internet-only publications, which I support, and have been active in challenging the high cost of STM magazines through a number of new projects, including pre-print archives and self-archiving. Then there was the loss of members who decided to read the issue through their lab's site license, which I mentioned earlier.
Our studies also showed several other worrisome trends. The main one being that many of our members were spending less time reading. Stuff like the Internet and othe tech toys were taking up more of their time. This trend affects all publishers right now, but it certainly turned up in our research. Another problem was th graying of our membership base. Somebody at AAAS once told me that research showed that it was a waste of time to try and get young scientists to join the association. The research showed that money spent on getting new members didn't pay off until they snagged somebody who was at least 46-years-old. That may be what the research showed, but the association I belong to, the American Library Association, has alot of young members. Granted that scientists normally finish their schooling laters than librarians, still, I think that AAAS has an image problem that keeps the young scientists away,
AAAS decided to do several things to fight back against the trends. My boss charged me with creating a members-only webiste, which we launched in January after a year of work. This project will probably help retain a few members and attract some new ones, but AAAS is still moving too slow to effectively cope with the changes that it faces.
<< Chuck0 >>
This was the year *everything* changed.
-- Commander Ivanova, 2261
Mid-Atlantic Infoshop -> http://www.infoshop.org/ Alternative Press Review -> http://www.altpr.org/ Practical Anarchy Online -> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/
Homepage -> http://flag.blackened.net/chuck0/home/
"A society is a healthy society only to the degree that it exhibits anarchistic traits."
- Jens Bjørneboe