Informa, the owner of Taylor and Francis, has published their first half results for 2009 - see the Informa Investors Page.
Highlights: academic publishing revenues and profits are up in the first half of 2009. Informa's Peter Rigby sees open access as not a bother for HSS, less relevant to a company like Informa than to a pure STM publisher. At least one shareholder is wondering whether Informa will push harder to move to an OA business model.
Details
From the presentation powerpoint:
Publishing – Academic Information
Resilient performance
• Revenue increase of 25% (organic 4%)
• Adjusted operating profit increase of 45% (organic 4%)
Overall operating profit margin for informa was 23%, reflecting both strong performance in academic publishing and weak performance in events.
Notes from the webcast Q and A session
Interesting question (see the end of the Q and A session) about "pushing harder into an open access business model". According to Informa's Peter Rigby, OA is less relevant to HSS and hence Informa as a mixed HSS/STM publisher; Informa is allowing post-peer-review self-archiving and has an open choice option, so is doing just fine.
Another question related to whether Informa is doing anything about the cost in the area of academic information. No need, says Peter Rigby, as the sector is doing strong. This is an excellent illustration of the inelasticity of this market. Taylor & Francis is growing in profits in spite of a worldwide financial crisis. No reason to look for efficiencies!
This post is part of the transitioning to open access series.
