0.5 Potential effects of online access on society membership

Membership exposure to institutional site licenses

The value that members perceive in society membership comprises many benefits—both tangible and intangible—that the society delivers. Typically, the primary motivation cited for society membership is community affinity, with a journal subscription being an important, albeit secondary, benefit. On the motivations to society membership generally, see Tschirhart (2006), Dalton and Dignam (2007), and Waltham (2008). See also the “Reasons for Society Membership” table below. However, there may be some individuals for whom a journal subscription represents the sole motivation for membership, and these members might not renew if access to the society’s journal becomes available via an electronic site license at their home institutions.

Despite the growing number of online journals, there is no publicly available empirical data that documents the effect of institutional online site licenses on society membership. Although there is little evidence to suggest that societies have experienced significant declines in membership as a result of making their journals available online, some societies will find this lack of negative evidence insufficient. A society that is apprehensive may want to analyze for itself the potential effect of online availability on the society’s membership.

An online version of a journal might result in individual members not renewing their membership when both of the following conditions pertain:

• The member has ready access to the journal through an institutional site license; and
• The member does not perceive sufficient value in the other member benefits.

We describe below some simple analyses that a society can perform to assess the extent to which these conditions pertain to its members and thus better understand the risks to its member base of online distribution. The force of these analyses will often depend on the depth and quality of demographic information that a society has about its members. Some societies gather this information as part of the membership process, others gather it (typically, with less specificity) through Web-based member surveys, while others rely solely on experience and intuition. In the latter case, a society may have little choice but to rely on general or discipline-specific trends.

These analyses also rely on the society having sound data about the characteristics of its institutional subscribers, including institution type (college, university, public library, museum, etc.), geographic location, and the institution’s subscription profile (for example, whether an institution holds duplicate print subscriptions to the same journal). In some cases, the society will need to retrieve this information from a publishing partner or subscription agent. As with member demographic data, the value of the data available will vary from one society to another. There are several research tools that a society can apply to gather data about its members and their perceptions of a society and the benefits it delivers. McQuarrie (1996) provides an excellent basic guide to the tools of market research. A survey specifically designed for membership organizations is available from the ASAE and the Association for Association Leadership ( www.asaecenter.org/decisiontojoin ) and described in Dalton and Dignam (2007).