An Open Letter From the New President of IGI Global

As you may already know, in January 2022 I was named as the new President of IGI Global publishing house, a great honor. I am enthusiastically ready to tackle many challenges currently facing the publishing industry and independent publishers during these ever-changing times. I do realize that I am joining the ranks of very few female leaders in academic publishing, a traditionally male-dominated industry, and I look forward to using my experience to contribute extensively to the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement.

Shattering the Glass Ceiling

Over the years, I have learned so much from my mentors and received immense support from my peers. Through this Open Letter to my valued librarian colleagues, my hope is to establish a direct dialogue with as many of you as possible in the global academic library community. I firmly believe that your wisdom and experience will undoubtedly assist me as I lead IGI Global and work to serve the research community for many years to come. For those of you who are not fully familiar with my background and IGI Global as an organization, please allow me to shed some light…

I joined IGI Global back in 2006 as an Editorial Assistant. I quickly worked my way up through the ranks to Assistant Director of Editorial Content, then to Editorial Director, and then most recently serving as Managing Director for more than 10 years prior to being promoted to President. I have always firmly believed that hard work, commitment, and determination are critical to achieving career goals. I am so happy to be working for an organization where I have never felt any level of discrimination, which regrettably still exists in many corporate settings for female leaders to excel to top positions. Our company carries a strong belief in people regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, religion, country of origin, disabilities, fully supporting that all should be provided equal opportunities.

Practicing What We Preach

Our top leadership is comprised of diverse individuals sharing their unique perspectives. Beyond me, our executive leadership includes Melissa Wagner, Vice President of Editorial; Karin Gould, Business Manager; Justin North, Vice President of Information Technology & Communication; and Nick Newcomer, Vice President of Marketing & Sales. These leaders represent an array of backgrounds and interests. For instance, our Vice President of Marketing & Sales, Mr. Newcomer, has a visual impairment and as such is dedicated to ensuring that content accessibility and sensitivity to user needs is at the forefront of the products that he and his team promote. We apply our principles to everything we do, both internally and externally. As a matter of fact, because our publishing house so strongly champions the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement, we recently compiled one of the largest collections of academic books in the area of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Over the years, our unorthodox equal opportunity business practices where we work with researchers from all over the world at different stages of their research careers (ensuring that we are representing even the most underrepresented research areas and researchers), has garnered us some kickback by some of the mega academic publishers. IGI Global has worked with nearly 150,000+ international scholars, 40% of whom hail from non-Western countries, to provide the most innovative research from some of the brightest, aspiring experts all over the globe. Over the years, due to our historic approach to collaborating with researchers from underdeveloped to developed, and advanced countries and expanding publishing opportunities and resources to researchers all over the world, we have received some criticism from some researchers in the western hemisphere over our broad publishing practices. Some of these parties have unfairly labeled us as “write-only”, “rogue”, and as a “vanity publisher”. I plan to educate these individuals about their misunderstanding of our non-discriminatory and inclusive approach and in some cases fight back on these uninformed and biased criticisms.

In addition to our commitment to inclusivity, we are also focused on ensuring that we have strong corporate social responsibility and frequently partner with local and global organizations to ensure that we are actively supporting those in need. For instance, IGI Global is a proud supporter of the World Forgotten Children Foundation (WFCF), and we currently donate 5% of all of our Online Bookstore purchases to WFCF causes.

A Small But Mighty Fish in a Big, Big Pond

Our size is our biggest advantage, and we are a force to be taken seriously. As one of the few independent academic publishers remaining in the industry, we offer much more flexibility, innovation, and agility which provide us much more sensitivity toward the needs of our stakeholders. While our size has always had us perceived as a “small fish” in a big pond, often unwelcome by the larger fish, our agility and expertise has allowed us to be 100% in-line with the larger conglomerate publishers, while still being able to stick to the ideals of an independent publisher. I would be lying if I said we haven’t had some cheap shots thrown at us, including, just like other publishers, the occasional bad publicity driven by researchers whose work was rejected for one reason or another and who use social media as a platform to attack us, or competing publishers trying to capitalize on negative comments made about us more than a decade ago. Despite some of this negative and unfair publicity, we have thrived over the years and these days we receive an extraordinary number of proposals from researchers from all over the world including many from prominent research institutions who have very high respect for our publishing house and are choosing us over other publishers. The top 5% of researchers all over the world come to us to take their ideas from concept to publication, including researchers such as Prof. Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos from The University of Oviedo, Spain, who was recently named to the “Stanford University’s Ranking of the World Scientists: World’s Top 2% Scientists" list for her research in the social sciences fields. She has made substantial contributions to IGI Global’s title holdings through her editorship of the open access journal, International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management (IJABIM), which is indexed in both Web of Science ESCI and Scopus, as well as her editorship of numerous book projects, including, the Handbook of Research on Developing Circular, Digital, and Green Economies in Asia and also IT and the Development of Digital Skills and Competences in Education (which she co-edited with Dr. Miltiadis D. Lytras, American College of Greece, Greece & Effat University, Saudi Arabia and Dr. Xi Zhang, Tianjin University, China).

Coming Out of the Pandemic

We were very fortunate to come out of the pandemic unharmed, and our expected volume of growth over the next year will be tremendous. Through the use of technologically advanced infrastructures that we have invested in and developed over the last several years and our sound editorial workflows, our portfolio is expected to grow by another 600+ book titles in 2022 (to put this into perspective, this output is comparable to Sage publishing who releases 800+ titles per year), within our major academic subjects including business & management, computer science & information technology, engineering, education, healthcare, social sciences & humanities, and more. This will ensure we exceed 6,600+ total published books, and our journal portfolio currently carries more than 177 active journals. We are anticipating a major shift in the industry during the next 5-10 years toward 100% digital delivery and IGI Global is in an excellent position for this transition with no difficulties. Believe it or not, IGI Global was actually one of the first academic publishers of our size, and really overall, to have started e-publishing so early in the game and we currently have an excellent e-content delivery infrastructure for our individual digital publications and robust e-Book Collection and e-Journal Collection offerings, including discipline- and subject-specific bundles. We are also continuously making improvements to our database platform, submission and peer review system, as well as other proprietary systems within our publishing house. While I’m pleased to tout our level of growth, I’m equally (if not more) proud of our commitment to the highest ethical standards, evidenced by our rigorous double-blind peer review process for all publications and our full membership to the international Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Content Accessibility and Open Access

As part of our commitment to greater content accessibility, we are making huge strides in our conversion from paywalled content to open access (OA) and are offering some of the most reasonably priced article processing charges (APCs) and chapter processing charges (CPCs) to our authors. To date, we are currently carrying two platinum OA journals, 64 gold OA journals, and 111 hybrid OA journals, and we estimate that by 2025 our entire journal collection will be 100% OA. Additionally, we offer the opportunity for chapter contributors to publish under OA in our books, and we also will be releasing full OA books in the months ahead. We have many OA partnerships and initiatives in place to support greater OA content and data distribution - OA Switchboard, Unpaywall, Jisc, RoR, and we also offer a very realistic transformative OA model that allows libraries to support their faculty with OA publishing.

At Your Service…

I’ve always believed that a leader should be as accessible as possible, staying in direct communication with its constituents and stakeholders. As such, my hope is to communicate with the library community directly through my quarterly Open Letter to share some of the latest trends in academic publishing, new offerings and innovations at IGI Global, and how we can unite to face many of the challenges being presented to all of us. I am committed to ensuring that our publishing models, platform, and products are exceeding the highest level of expectations in academic publishing. I look forward to seeing how we as an industry can come together, learn from one another, and innovate every aspect of what we do with the highest level of quality and integrity. Therefore, please kindly feel free to share with me any suggestions and/or guidance that you can. I welcome your feedback.