American Psychiatric Press Globally Respected

APA has three subsidiary 501(c)3 components. Publishing is the largest, representing 45 percent of actual revenue in 2002. American Psychiatric Publishing Inc. (APPI) was founded more than 20 years ago and today publishes (and holds copyright to) more than 80 percent of the best intellectual and scholarly content in psychiatry, including 50 or more books each year and five journals. Although APA owns and publishes the flagship American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatric Services, and Psychiatric News, they too are managed by APPI since APA completed a corporate reorganization in 2000. APA and APPI’s newest joint venture, Focus: The Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry, was launched in January 2003 and has already grown to nearly 2,000 subscribers.

Having APPI affords several benefits to the Association. Publishing (APPI and the APA journals) accounted for $25.8 million in revenue last year. Just as important as the dollars is the ownership and control of the intellectual property. The APA and APPI journals and books are peer reviewed and professionally edited. In addition, APPI also manages the price to keep the journals affordable to libraries and public institutions and provides reasonable prices and discounts to APA members. Of course, U.S. and Canadian members receive the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) and Psychiatric News as a member benefit and can also get a free subscription to Psychiatric Services by request.

In the past decade, many of the commercial publishers that were APPI’s competitors have disappeared as the publishing industry consolidated into a few large conglomerates. Almost all of the commercial publishing in medicine is controlled by Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer International. These companies have been concentrating primarily on journals and a handful of major textbooks. They have raised the subscription prices to the point that libraries have had to cut back on the number of titles to which they subscribe. By way of comparison, the library rate for AJP is $399 a year, while Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, is $1,864.

Still, publishing is highly competitive, and APPI must play within the larger publishing community. APPI pays competitive royalties to its authors and attends the major publishing conferences including the American Medical Publishers Association, American Association of University Presses, and others to keep abreast of the trends. It also attends the Frankfurt Book Fair each fall to sell translation rights to its titles. Translations now account for nearly $500,000 of revenue each year.

Publishing in the 21st century is changing dramatically with the growth of the Internet. The APA and APPI journals (the latter include Academic Psychiatry, American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, Journal of Neuropsychiatry, and Psychosomatics) are online at www.psychiatryonline.org. These sites are managed by Stanford University’s HighWire Press, which also manages more than 300 scholarly journals in medicine and the physical sciences. Electronic publishing poses a number of opportunities, but also has some risk. Managing subscription prices in a world where users increasingly rely on libraries rather than personal subscriptions and figuring out where the future of advertising lies are but two of the challenges.

APPI is a not-for-profit organization, much like a university press. It is wholly owned by APA and must, by its charter, contribute to the goals and mission of its parent organization. It has 79 staff—41 work on the editorial side, and 38 handle the business aspects, including marketing, advertising, and order fulfillment. Although most scholarly societies publish a journal or two, few have a separate company to publish books. APPI also publishes journals for three of the psychiatric subspecialties.

At APA’s 2002 annual meeting, APPI honored three members responsible for its growth and success: Melvin Sabshin, M.D., founding chair of the APPI Board; Shervert Frazier, M.D., founding editor in chief; and Carol Nadelson, M.D., APPI’s first chief executive officer. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

In future columns I will address some of the details of publishing, such as how books are priced and how APA members can be published by APPI.

Feel free to direct any questions or comments to me or to Ron McMillen, CEO of APPI, at (703) 907-7892. ▪