The medical journal publishing industry is in the midst of a rapid transformation. Traditional publishing is slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past. Books, newspapers and magazines were the first to make the move from print to digital in order to survive declining subscribers. The advent of digital devices like Kindles and tablets have made it even easier for consumers to access digital content.
Unfortunately, medical journal publishers weren’t as quick to make the switch to digital content as their entertainment publication counterparts, which is why the Global Medical Publishing Market is expected to witness a declining CAGR of 0.56 percent through to 2018.
But this market hasn’t flat-lined yet!
There are a few trends emerging in the medical publishing market that are expected to restore market growth and help restore stability:
- Emergence of New Market Landscape
China, Brazil, South Korea, and India have emerged as serious publishers of scientific content alongside the traditional scientific superpowers, the US, Western Europe, and Japan. The US remains on top, but its global share of published scientific papers reduced by 3 percent since 2012.
Meanwhile, China rose to second place, passing major medical publishing players to hold a 12 percent market share as of 2013. In addition, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North America and other countries emerged as contributors to the world scientific literature due to favorable government policies and the increase in income in these countries.
- Emergence of Digital Medical Journal Delivery
The online medium has become the major method of medical journal delivery. This has eased the task of delivering journals and books physically across the globe. This method also saves time, and it is convenient for the readers to carry the digital content on their mobile devices. It also directly integrates into the libraries’ main database through which multiple users can access the same digital content at the same time, so the library does not need to keep multiple copies of the books and journals.
- Increased Availability of Digital Content in Multiple Languages
The major publishers use English as the language for publishing their digital content. However, with the growing market in countries like China, Brazil, South Korea, and others, the publishers are starting to provide their content in non-English languages. Publishers are providing various tools to the readers to translate the digital content.
For instance UpToDate, a Wolters Kluwer product, helps translate content in Mandarin Chinese into both simplified and traditional French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The service already had English and Japanese search capabilities. OvidSP, a database search interface, has language search portals for Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and French.
EBSCOhost and EBSCO Discovery Service are the online database of EBSCO Publishing which can be searched in 40 of the most common languages. Thus, the increased availability of digital content in various languages is one of the major trends which can be seen in the market during the forecast period.
Assuming medical journal publishers have already begun planning for the future, and one can only assume that they have, there should be no reason why these trends won’t help the medical publishing market rebound or even reach new heights.
To view a complete list of trends, or for more information, view our 2014-2018 Global Medical Publishing Market report.
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