an interview with mary ann liebert and tom mulak

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0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S0098-7913(03)00033-9

An Interview with Mary Ann Liebertand Tom Mulak

Emily McElroy, Column Editor

with a contribution from Ramune Kubilius

Ramune Kubilius interviewed Mary Ann Liebert, president and founder of the family-owned publishing company, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., and Tom Mulak, vice presidentof Liebert Online, in December 2002. In this interview, Liebert responds to questionsabout her motivations for founding a publishing company, what she feels makes itunique in the current publishing industry, and its past, present, and potential futuredirections in journal publishing. Liebert and Mulak expressed opinions on the com-pany’s e-journal strategies and the company’s relationship with editors and institu-tional subscribers. Serials Review 2003; 29:137–143.

© 2003 Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For many in the biomedi-cal field, the publishername Mary Ann Liebert,Inc., is familiar because ofits journal titles empha-sizing cutting edge re-search and technologies inthe fields of biomedicine,biotechnology, and clini-cal medicine and surgery.Mary Ann Liebert, com-pany founder and presi-dent, recently provided anopportunity for questionsabout and insights intothe past, present, and fu-ture of Mary Ann Liebert,Inc. With a journalismbackground and publishing industry experience, MaryAnn Liebert founded her own publishing company in1980, a company that publishes journals, trade publica-tions, and newsletters; produces databases; and alsosponsors conferences. The questions posed to Mary AnnLiebert focused on the founding of her company, as wellas her visions for the company and the publishing indus-try, particularly in the biotechnology and biomedical

journal arena. Tom Mulak, vice president of LiebertOnline, answered questions on how Mary Ann Liebert,Inc., distributes e-journals. Mulak also shared informa-tion on his background and the route by which he cameto work at Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

Ramune Kubilius

(RK): Currently, your Website listsMary Ann Liebert, Inc., as having “Over 20 Years as theLeading Publishers in the Field of Biotechnology.”

1

Yet inthe “About” section, there is a list of other areas in whichyou are involved, “the most exciting and promising areasof biomedical research, clinical medicine and surgery,law, and science.” What do you consider your true corearea or areas?

Mary Ann Liebert

(MAL):

Genetic Engineering News

was the first publication in the field of biotechnology andis the most widely read worldwide in this field; it is ourflagship publication. Many of our core journals are relatedto biotechnology and in the field of biomedical researchincluding

Human Gene Therapy

,

Tissue Engineering

, and

ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies

. We are def-initely concentrated in the field of biomedical researchand clinical medicine; however, our three law journalsare the only ones in their fields.

RK: You have done a number of interviews and presen-tations about your company. For example, in June 1995,Katina Strauch interviewed you for

Against the Grain

.

2

In August 2000 you were also interviewed by Adam Shellfor

USA Today

.

3

One of these publications is an infor-mation industry newsletter publication and the other is a

Kubilius

is Collection Development/Special Projects Librarian,Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chi-cago, IL 60611; e-mail: [email protected].

Serials Conversations

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McElroy / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 137–143

general interest newspaper, so some of the remarks mayhave been geared toward those specific readerships. In anutshell, what background on your company wouldreaders of

Serials Review

find inspiring or unexpected?

MAL: I care passionately about medical research andthe promise that it holds for health and humanity. I de-rive great joy out of knowing that as a result of some-thing that has been published in one of our journals, newapplications of research and therapeutic applications cancure or treat diseases. It is extremely rewarding to mewhen researchers and clinicians tell me that these publi-cations make such significant contributions. I keep upwith the fields in which I publish because I am genuinelyinterested in them. I am a voracious reader, attend scien-tific meetings, and am quickly responsive to changingneeds in a given field. I’m willing to establish journals inembryonic research and other highly specialized areas,such as lymphatic research and biology, because such ajournal absolutely fosters research (and stimulates fund-ing for some) and becomes a focal point for interdiscipli-nary studies. Our newest journal,

Biosecurity and Bio-terrorism

, is the only multi-disciplinary journal to dealwith this subject, and I am intent that it should be an im-portant contribution to bioterrorism prevention andpreparation for any such eventuality. This journal, witha February 2003 debut, was nearly a year in planning.

Librarians might be surprised to know how involvedI am in the journal acquisition process. Before I launcha journal, I explore a field thoroughly, learning as muchas I can about the research and promise for clinical ap-plication. I speak to researchers and clinicians. I am verywell connected because we have earned the respect of thescientific community. Scientists are responsive to myquestions—and I ask a million of them. I want to be surethat a journal will not only make a contribution to theliterature but also to the field. We are not a “me-too”publisher and like to be first in a promising field. Exam-ples abound, such as

AIDS Research and Human Retro-viruses

,

AIDS Patient Care and STD’s

,

Human GeneTherapy

,

Journal of Interferon and Cytokine Research

,and newer journals such as

High Altitude Medicine andBiology

, and, of course,

Biosecurity and Bioterrorism

.We have no set formulas, and every single journal hasbeen structured to meet the needs of its field. Librariansmight also be surprised to hear that I am always con-cerned with reasonable pricing so that these journals canbe part of their collection. I care greatly that these jour-nals are read.

RK: How does a journalism major with an ill parent (asyou described in your background) move out of journal-ism and personal medical information research into mar-keting for another publisher, and then later found yourown company?

MAL: My father’s illness prompted my interest in med-icine so that I became attracted to medical publishing, orscientific publishing. I never wanted to be a doctor andcouldn’t dissect a frog. I did not have the goal of owningmy own company. It happened almost by serendipity. Iwanted to launch publications in what I thought were the

newest and most promising areas of biomedical research,but they were so new that established publishers foundthem economically unattractive. In order to launch

Ge-netic Engineering News

, I had to be on my own. I alwayssay that if I had not capitalized it myself, it would neverhave been published. Venture capitalists would havesaid, “Well, Mary Ann, how many genetic engineers arethere?” Don’t forget this was 1980 and biotechnologywas in its infancy. Also, we were the first to publish ajournal in the field of AIDS, well before it was declaredan epidemic. The field was so new that it took us twoyears to produce a quarterly volume because there was solittle research. We persevered. I could not have done thatif I had to worry about meeting financial expectationsand satisfying stockholders, the way publicly held con-glomerates have to do.

RK: How do you think the “big guys” view the com-pany and your publications?

MAL: The big guys are ardent suitors! In our receptionhall there is a framed photograph of Carl Icahn with aninscription, “I want to buy your company!” It was abirthday present from Carl who has been known as a cor-porate raider. He is a close personal friend, and I have ithanging out front to discourage predators!

RK: You currently publish journals, books, trade maga-zines, and newsletters. Your company also has a confer-ence arm. If the numbers and fractions were reflected inpie charts, what fraction of your company’s effortswould be displayed in the serials/journals slice? Biomed-ical versus other areas?

MAL: Most of our efforts are concentrated on journalpublishing. Biomedical research and medicine remain ourpriority. We have several legal journals, all of which wereestablished to meet growing areas of legal specialization.

RK: A bit more about the company behind the scenes.Has the number of employees changed since 2000 whenit was listed as a 100-employee firm?

MAL: The size of the staff has remained about the samebecause changes in technology enable efficiencies thatfree up staff members for other responsibilities.

RK: Any other numbers you would like to share?

MAL: Not really. We are a privately held company.

RK: You are a family-owned publisher. How do you findthe right balance between family member involvementand hired staff involvement?

MAL: A tough question. My husband is a surgeon andwe share so much interest in these fields; my son Lewis isa vice president. When a child elects to come into a par-ent’s business, it is an affirmation of your vision and ac-complishments and the worthiness of the endeavor. Thisis enormously gratifying. So many fine publishing com-panies started by scientists or a publishing visionary havebeen gobbled up and no longer retain the personal com-mitment to science and medicine that their founders had.Something important is lost in that process. The contin-uation of Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., as a family business

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ensures the continuation of the company’s contributionto the sciences in the future.

My mind, a happy one, is usually operating on twelvecylinders. I am always thinking of more than one thing ata time. I may be doing things around the house with thefamily and conceptualizing a new journal at the sametime. I also enjoy opera, ballet, and gardening. I am a vo-racious reader; I adore biographies and good mysteriesand behind-the-scenes political tell-alls. Oh yes, I love todance.

T

om Mulak

(TM): Before I joined Mary Ann Liebert,Inc., my ex-boss looked me in the eye and said, “If youthink I’m tough, you should see what your new boss islike, she’s a tiger.” Well, a couple of months after I joinedmy new firm I told Mary Ann this story and said I didn’tthink she was a “tiger.” She was amused by the story andconfessed that she liked being thought of as a “tiger,” es-pecially being a woman in a male-dominated business.The following story will not contribute to Mary Ann’simage as a “tiger” (although for causes she believes in,she is indeed a “tiger” in the best sense of the word), butit will illustrate how she treats her staff as family. Abouttwo years ago, my father was slowly dying of congestiveheart failure. Mary Ann sensed something was wrongwith me, and when I opened up that I was depressed, shechecked with some of her contacts in the mental healtharea and linked me up with a psychiatrist who helped mecope with this crisis. I really can’t imagine many chief ex-ecutive officers going out of their way to help one of theirstaff. It’s this kind of “capitalism with a human face”that has contributed to the creation of a dedicated andloyal staff at our company.

RK: How many other U.S. publishing companies mightyou consider to be of a similar size and caliber?

MAL: I don’t know. Very few. It is worrisome to see somany companies disappearing or becoming part of largercompanies. The larger companies have to pay for theseacquisitions and economic considerations become para-mount. I do not think there are many in which thefounder is actively involved and running the company.

RK: What publication processes (from submissionthrough peer review, editing, publication) do your jour-nals have that might be the same or different from that ofsociety-run or larger publishers?

MAL: Every journal’s publication process is developedto meet the specific needs of its editor(s) and the field itserves. There is no one-fits-all cookie-cutter mold. For in-stance, we have two journals in the field of alternativemedicine.

Journal of Alternative Medicine

is a fully peer-reviewed journal.

Alternative and Complementary Ther-apies

includes profiles of people and of institutions sothat those who want to know more about this field anddevelop programs that encompass alternative therapiescan learn from the experience of others without havingto re-invent the wheel.

When we launched our journal,

Human Gene Ther-apy

, the field was so new that Dr. W. French Anderson,the father of gene therapy, could not easily find a journal

in which to publish his own papers on this subject. To ad-vance the understanding and research, we created

Hu-man Gene Therapy

, which began as a quarterly and isnow published eighteen times a year. It is the leadingjournal for investigators, and Dr. Anderson is the editor-in-chief.

RK: What do you see as your current priorities? If youhad to rank some of these in order of importance, wouldthey include getting recognition for your company?Making sure you stay profitable? Recognition or buy-inamong subject professional experts for some of yourtitles? Getting indexed? Making sure that consortia pickup your titles in their electronic licensing deals on behalfof their members? Getting your full text into aggregateddatabases?

MAL: Profitability has to be a major concern of anypublisher because it enables us to create and nurturejournals in cutting-edge fields that not only enhance theliterature, but also advance the field. However, we aremost fortunate in that we do not need the same huge levelsof profitability as do conglomerates or publicly heldcompanies, profits that are necessary to satisfy stock-holders. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Excellence of content is paramount. It is very impor-tant to me that our journals have a reputation for theirhigh editorial content. And we want researchers and cli-nicians to read these publications so we try to price themas reasonably as possible—“leave no library behind.”Electronic licensing is now an important part of any pub-lishing business, but high standards for the publicationsare the foundation on which everything else is built. Cer-tainly every publisher is concerned with being indexedand having consortia business, as well as everything elseyou mentioned.

RK: What sort of collaborative ventures do you havewith other publishers or libraries or professional societ-ies? Do you see a role for your information products insubject portals produced by other information industryentities?

MAL: We have no collaborative ventures with otherpublishers or libraries, but we welcome new opportuni-ties all the time. I like exploring new concepts and hopeyour readers will contact me if they have a concept onwhich we might work together. Many professional soci-eties come to us, but I never try to take a society awayfrom a publisher with whom they have a relationship,and I will not bid on another publisher’s journal.

RK: It’s interesting that Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., agreedto consortia deals like the one with Illinois Digital Aca-demic Library (IDAL). It was a positive move from a li-brarian’s perspective. How was it decided to “jump onthe bandwagon” or “buck the trend” as compared to theactions of other publishers?

TM: We saw the IDAL deal as an opportunity to givesmaller institutions the opportunity to access our titles.We have a formidable mass of cutting edge material inbiomedicine and biotechnology (over fifty journals),with over one thousand issues online as of the end of

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2002. Unfortunately, many consortia are monopolizedby the mega-publishers with hundreds of titles in all sub-ject areas so it is hard for a smaller, independent pub-lisher to get noticed, even when everyone is concernedabout too many titles being consolidated into just a fewpublishers. However, because we are independent, wecan negotiate quickly and with flexibility and pragma-tism. We are very pleased by the deals we have made withIDAL and with the California Digital Library. We standready to negotiate with other consortia, as well as indi-vidual institutions, multinational corporation, and hos-pital chains. The big winners in these deals are the actualusers.

RK: Whose responsibility is electronic archiving? Thepublishing industry? National libraries? Third parties(such as JSTOR)? Alternatively, can and should smallerpublishing companies such as yours house archives?

TM: As an independent, family-owned publisher, wecan assure our subscribers that archives of our materialwill be maintained because we aren’t going to be gobbledup by another publisher that might feel they can’t honorthat commitment. But in terms of the overall publishingindustry, the concept of a national library (e.g., in theUnited States, the Library of Congress) as electronic ar-chivist for all materials makes sense.

RK: What do you see as the publisher’s role? What doyou think of “born electronic” efforts such as BioMed-Central where the publishing and editorial role is morecentralized?

MAL: Print is staying strong. It is read differently; itserves a different function. I am very computer literateand read online all the time. But I read print differentlyand get different advantages from both. Researchers andclinicians alike are always making this point and empha-sizing that they need print as well as the electronic ver-sion. The archiving issue is one that worries researchersenormously.

TM: Regarding initiatives like BioMedCentral, it is tooearly to assess the results of their experiment. There willbe growing costs, and sooner or later such costs will haveto be addressed.

RK: Does the publishing and scholarly world need asmany journal titles as are being spun off?

MAL: The last thing the world needs is another journal;however, a new journal that is well conceived can help afield to grow and advance. We have seen this happen overand over again.

TM: We feel that new titles we have launched in the lastyear, such as

Election Law Journal

,

Astrobiology

,

VectorBourne and Zoonotic Diseases

, and

Biosecurity and Bio-terrorism

are titles that are needed, and aren’t just clonesor spurious spin-offs The Florida election and other ex-amples make it clear that elections will never be the sameand that many legal challenges will confront the courtsystem. Astrobiology is a promising field for medical re-search and this one journal, which is the only one inthis field, creates a dialogue in the life sciences and phys-

ical sciences that will be productive. West Nile virus andother vector borne and zoonotic diseases are now recog-nized as a serious threat to public health, although re-search funding has been scant until now. Again, here is acase of a journal that will help advance the field and fos-ter research. The need for

Biosecurity and Bioterrorism

cannot be more self-evident. It has a stellar editorialboard, which is essential in an area that is so complexand has so many sensitivities.

RK: How do you as a publisher justify the numerous“hot topic” journals? How many years do you give ajournal before you decide to change its name, merge itwith another or discontinue it completely? How mightthis change in the increasingly electronic world?

MAL: Many publishers see “hot topic” journals as onesthat could bring in hot numbers of subscriptions. We donot think that way. We are well recognized for establishingimportant journals in fields long before they are desig-nated “hot.” Our AIDS journals and

Human Gene Ther-apy

are good examples. Every journal is assessed yearly toaddress the changing nature of a specific field to ensurethat the needs of those in the field are being met. We havethe flexibility to do whatever is necessary to ensure its rel-evance. As always, I am lucky that I do not need to meetstockholder expectations so that we can take a journaland nurture it, without unrealistic expectations of finan-cial return over a particular time that is fixed by the needto ensure stockholder satisfaction.

TM: If we did have the constraints of stockholder expec-tation, an ahead-of-its-time title like

Journal of Alterna-tive and Complementary Medicine

(founded in 1995 andone of the few peer-reviewed journals in its field that isincluded in MEDLINE) would have been cancelled; in-stead, it was nurtured and is now growing in subscrip-tion, readership, and citation as the field has finally comeof age.

RK: Present challenges: What do you see as some ofyour current challenges? Individual or institutional sub-scriptions? Keeping up with technology? Planning foryour future company’s growth in other ways?

MAL: The challenge is always attracting and retainingsubscriptions from institutional and individual sub-scribers. This means that the quality of content must beparamount and that pricing must respect budgetaryconstraints. However, I was very disturbed once when Iwas talking to a librarian who told me that she wouldpay any price a publisher put forth if they really wantedthe journal. I thought to myself, “Wow, this means thatwe can charge anything we want for a core journal andlibrarians will accept that.” In good conscience, how-ever, I could not do that; but I am amazed that librarianswill pay subscription prices that they consider exces-sive. I find this troubling because what it says is thatpricing is not important if the journal is deemed to beimportant.

RK: If you had a crystal ball, what do you see as the fu-ture for smaller publishers such as yourselves? Whatabout the future of the print journal industry in general?

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MAL: I think that libraries are going to be increasinglyconcerned about the control of the market and the mo-nopolies that large conglomerates have in the scientific,technical, and medical (STM) field. This should be ex-tremely worrisome to librarians. I wonder, however, if li-brarians can stand up to these forces or whether they willcapitulate to pricing policies and other policies simplybecause of the huge number of titles tied to one or twogroups.

RK: The readers of this column are now familiar withMary Ann Liebert’s motivations for founding her ownpublishing company. Tom, what is your background?Did you work in the publishing or online information in-dustry before coming to Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.?

TM: My background is liberal arts. I came to New YorkCity from Massachusetts in 1970 to attend New YorkUniversity, and received a M.A. in English literature. I wasABD (All But Dissertation). I decided to not complete mythesis (maybe if the electronic resources had been avail-able in the 1970s I would have!) but to work in publish-ing instead and made a career of it. I think that publishingbenefited from the pool of folks, like me, who were lib-eral arts majors who couldn’t get a job in teaching.

At Plenum Publishing, my previous company, I rein-vented myself several times and headed the startup oftheir online journals program. I brought my expertise toMary Ann Liebert, Inc., and was given the independenceand resources to develop the Liebert Online program.

RK: How did you come to Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.?

TM: I had worked for a Manhattan-based STM publish-ing company (subsequently sold to another company) fortwenty-eight years. In the year of my fiftieth birthday, Ifelt I needed a change. I interviewed with a much largerSTM publisher (also subsequently sold to another com-pany) and Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. At the larger publish-ing company, I was interviewed by seven different peopleand didn’t like the impersonal and bureaucratic corpo-rate feel, and, frankly, many of the staff looked either de-moralized or disgusted. When I interviewed for the posi-tion at Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., I went to lunch withMary Ann and Vicki Cohn, the senior vice president, andit was so much more personal. I liked Mary Ann’s visionand style and the company ethos, which we affection-ately refer to as “The Liebert Way,” and decided I wouldrather work for a smaller, family-owned company. Myprevious employer was a publicly held company. Alwaysin the back of everyone’s mind was making business de-cisions, as well as qualitative decisions, based on the im-perative of making higher revenue than the prior quarterto satisfy the stockholders. We don’t have this you-are-only-as-good-as-your-last-financial-quarter syndrome atMary Ann Liebert, Inc.

RK: How long have you been working at Mary Ann Lie-bert, Inc.? What changes in the industry have you noticedmost since joining the company?

TM: I will have been here five years as of June 2003. Thebiggest change is the growth in access of our online jour-nal program—not only for the younger generation, but

even baby boomers like me are enjoying the features andfunctionality of the online version. I am also struck bythe way certain “bogey men” have vanished. For exam-ple, at one time document delivery, first by snail mail,then electronically, was perceived as a “threat” to thesubscription matrix. But selective pay-per-document hasturned out to complement rather than replace the sub-scription model. Or, the idea of usage statistics used toproduce a knee-jerk reaction from publishers. Not onlyare usage statistics no longer perceived to be threatening,they are now accepted by most publishers as a part ofdoing business.

RK: Has your job changed or evolved since you came toMary Ann Liebert, Inc.?

TM: Definitely. I love the new challenges as well as theautonomy which Mary Ann gives her staff, the opportu-nity to be able to develop and in new projects. My re-sponsibilities in managing the online program and sellinglicenses to consortia and global biotechnology and phar-maceutical companies have grown. I’m currently in-volved in the evolution of our

GEN Directory of Bio-technology Companies

from print and CD-ROM to adynamic online database,

GEN Database of Biotechnol-ogy Companies and Resources

. I’m also involved in ne-gotiating strategic relationships with third-party entities.It is very important that we have good relationships withsubscription agents, abstracting and indexing compa-nies, and document delivery firms, to name just a few.

RK: What are some the best forums or means you’vefound to stay in touch with institutional or individualsubscribers?

TM: I find that exhibiting at the Medical Library Asso-ciation’s annual meeting is very useful, since it helps usstay in touch with librarians. Katina Strauch’s Charles-ton Conference has consistently kept me on top of thingsin the publishing arena; some of the brightest and thebest participate in that conference.

4

The Association ofAmerican Publishers (AAP) sponsors some meaty confer-ences. I’m really looking forward to their annual conferencein Washington, D.C., in February. The conference iscalled “Smart Content: New Ways to Add Value.”

5

As far as personal subscribers, because of my roots insubscription fulfillment, I keep an eye on customer ser-vice feedback and personally look at every order thatcomes in. I have several friends in the biomedical areawho do lots of research, and I’m always using them as afocus group to better understand usage behavior, whichis a new area of serious study, judging from the presen-tations at the last Charleston Conference.

RK: Do you and your staff feel you have an advantage,as a smaller publisher, in responding to institutional sub-scribers’ concerns?

TM: As a smaller, independent company without layersof bureaucracy, we are able to address and react to con-cerns quickly. It’s usually the lawyers on the other sidethat hold things up when we’re negotiating. Wheneverwe reach an understanding, we immediately turn on the

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access “switch” so the users can begin enjoying the benefitsof our materials. We don’t wait for payment to arrive orto have every “t” crossed.

With the advent of online, it was naively thought thatclaims would go away. But technology has a way of caus-ing its own problems sometimes, such as a subscriberchanging their Internet protocol address without notify-ing us. Librarians have come up to me at meetings andsaid how terrific the administrator of our online programis in answering their queries and fixing the problem. Forexample, I took great pride when a library from Oregonmade a comment, “In my experience, you (and MaryAnn Liebert) are one of the best publishers/service reps towork with.” When we sign a deal with a consortium, wedon’t leave them high and dry if they have access prob-lems. We also save library staff time by automaticallysending purchasers of our Liebert Online collection thespecific URL for each of our titles, to facilitate setting upthe links in their online catalog.

RK: In informal settings at meetings, you may query li-brarians how they perceive the visibility of Mary AnnLiebert, Inc., journals, particularly electronic, in their en-vironments. As a rule, do Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., jour-nals have formal advisory boards of nonemployees (e.g.,customers/libraries, individual subscribers) the waysome other publishers do? If so, are they for particularpublications, particular products, ad hoc, or other?

TM: We have an informal network of librarians and sci-entists that we consult. Since we have close relationshipswith our editors, we value and solicit their input. Whenwe launch a new journal, we fly the editor into town andhe or she spends an entire day meeting with all the keypeople: editorial, production, marketing, informationtechnology, and circulation. We also do this for new ed-itors of older journals. By the end of the day, that editorhas a really good feeling for our corporate culture, andall of us at the company have a face and a personality togo with that editor.

A good example of how the “Liebert Way” works isthat when Dr. Sherry L. Cady, editor of

Astrobiology

, vis-ited, she brought with her a video of a cable-station pro-file of her in the field at a mineral pool at YellowstoneNational Park. It was really cool seeing her in action, andher passionate dedication to her field. It was also greathow so many of our journal editors and book authors(including some emeriti) attended Mary Ann’s twentiethanniversary celebration. Everyone got to have a DNAsample drawn to take home as a souvenir! Breaking breadhas a great way of creating lasting and mutually beneficialrelationships between our editors and our staff.

RK: Have your print journals and their electronic coun-terparts stayed essentially equivalent, or has Mary AnnLiebert, Inc., gone the route of some publishers in havingelectronic-only content that is available only to onlinesubscribers?

TM: We are not slaves to the print paradigm and wantto take advantage of the functionality that the online ver-sion has to offer. In addition to the obvious, such as full-

text searching and reference linking, there is the excitingworld of video clips of cells or a surgical procedure.

RK: How much of a delay (if any) is there between thetime the print journal comes out and when the electronicjournal content becomes available?

TM: Ideally, the electronic content should be availablethe day the print version is off the press. However, wehave some new paradigms. For our flagship journal,

Human Gene Therapy

, we are publishing each new pa-per online immediately as it is accepted, instead of wait-ing for the entire issue to be ready for publication. Thisis not a prepublication, where the pagination is subjectto change; it is the publication of record. This systemaccelerates the turnaround time from submission topublication, which is very important with a red-hotarea like human gene therapy. We also are proactivelysupplying the metadata of our journals to the NationalLibrary of Medicine to facilitate getting the citations upon MEDLINE.

RK: 2002 was a year of “flip-flop” pricing, a serials ven-dor going out of business, publisher mergers, and otherevents. What have your customers been telling you abouttheir biggest concerns?

TM: I think a big concern continues to be the securityof perpetual access to backfiles of the online version.There is an apprehension regarding the sustainability ofthe licensing model, fear that after “hooking” institu-tions and users to an online package, when the agree-ment runs out the publisher will try to hit them withsticker shock price. We assure librarians we will not doa “bait and switch” on them. We want any licensingagreement for Liebert Online to be a long-term commit-ment for both of us. The big winners are the end userswho will have access to a critical mass of cutting-edgematerial.

RK: Do you see large progress in new print or electronicsubscriptions in other countries of the world? If so,where: Canada, Europe, Asia, other?

TM: Electronic access options have opened up new mar-kets and helped generate new subscriptions in Europe,South America, and Africa.

RK: Where would you say buying or licensing consortiafor your titles is most prevalent? In the United States orother countries?

TM: For consortia, the United States, although, again,there is the problem that “the big boys” dominate theconsortia resources; it is sometimes hard to get us onthe agenda. In Europe, an obstacle has been the onerousand, in my opinion, discriminatory value-added taxwhich governments impose on electronic resources. Weinvite consortia worldwide to give ourselves and other in-dependent publishers the opportunity to provide a quota-tion. At Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., I guarantee that we willbe fast, flexible, and responsive in the negotiation process.

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Thank you to both Mary Ann Liebert and Tom Mulakfor their responses to the various questions posed. Thesebrief answers may prompt interested persons to explorefurther the inner workings of a private publishing com-pany. With information and insights gained from this“conversation,” readers may feel more inclined to con-tact Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., approach their representa-tives (including Tom Mulak) at various professionalmeetings or trade shows, or even have the pleasure ofmeeting with the founder and president herself. After all,in the course of this interview, Mary Ann has invitedreaders to contact her with any ideas they might have.

Notes

1. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., http://www.liebertonline.com (21 January2003).

2. Katina Strauch, “Interview with Mary Ann Liebert,”

Against theGrain

7 (June 1995): 33–36.

3. Adam Shell, “Passionate Publisher Chronicles Biotech Revolu-tion,”

USA Today

, 3 August 2000, 8B.

4. Charleston Conference on Issues in Book and Serial Acquisitions,http://www.cofc.edu/cdconference (21 January 2003).

5. Association of American Publishers, http://www.publishers.org (21January 2003).

an interview with mary ann liebert and tom mulak

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