Industrial Environment And Strategic Choices Of Chinese STM Publishers

Science, technology and medicine (STM) journals are the most important media in the diffusion of science and technology research results. Chinese STM journals have gotten significant progress in the recent decades. However, as a whole, Chinese STM journals cannot play an important role in the international competitive market. With the innovation of publishing system in China, it has become a hotspot that how can Chinese STM journals develop. Whether Chinese STM journals can be industrialized is still undefined, which results from the fuzzy judgement about whether it can develop as industries.In this dissertation, inspired by the industrialization of foreign STM publishing, Chinese STM journals are analyzed from the viewpoint of industrial economics. Main reasons that lead to the underdevelopment of Chinese STM publishing industries are obtained through detailed analysis on the macro-environment and industrial competition environment. It is found that, with strategy management, Chinese STM publishers can get developed as fundamental units in industrial domain. With appropriate strategies, Chinese STM publishers can even compete with international STM publishers. These conclusions help to overcome the idealistic obstacle in the publishing system innovation, offer new ideas for the management and system innovation of STM publishing, and suggest the possible strategies for the development of Chinese STM publishers.The dissertation is organized as follows.Firstly, the basic communication model is used to analyze the communicating elements of STM journals. Five characteristics are found through the analysis, i.e., the material contents in STM journal communication are confined, concentrated and quasi-monopolized; the information source and information sink superpose with each other; the content-determined audiences form a market; there are several kinds of gatekeepers, and some of them happen to be information source; a system for evaluating the communicating effect has already been well established, and it is quite different from the case of other mass media.Secondly, the macro-environment and industrial competition environment of STM publishing are analyzed in detail based on the theory of industrial economics, the political, economic, social, and technology (PEST) model, and Porter's industrial competition theory, respectively. Considering the political environment, Chinese STM publishing is still under too much government control. This may obstruct the industrialization of STM publishing. For the social environment, the STM publishers are distributed in a disordered system lack of industrial concepts. Rapid growth of Chinese economics makes more investments on science research become available, which gives STM publishing the greatest chance. The developments in science and technology directly enlarge the STM publishing market. The improvements in communicating techniques may bring both opportunities and threats.As for the competition environments, a novel concept called "strategy group" is defined to classify the competitors. Entry barriers will be broken if an entrant can sheer the differentiation barrier, so that the existing STM publishers will face the high threat of new entrants. The relationship between STM publishers exhibits the dualism of competition and cooperation. The bargaining power of suppliers and customers is affected by two factors: economy of scale, and quality of STM journals. With the networking of modern publishing, the STM publishing industry undergoes real substitution threats. Evolution is necessary to deal with these threats.According to McGahan's industrial evolution theory, the STM publishing industry is judged to be experiencing the coexisting stage of intermediating evolution.Possible basic strategies are listed for the STM publishers in different strategy groups. Issues of vertical integration and diversification are briefly introduced. These conclusions are validated by using practical examples. Feasible measures against the entrance of international STM publishers to China are also given.In this dissertation, the communicating characteristics of STM journals are found, and theories of strategy management and industrial evolution are applied to STM publishing, thus some unrecognized rules of STM publishing industries are obtained.However, only some elementary research has been performed on the STM publishing industries. In the future, more positive and quantitative analyses are needed to figure out the practical and concrete schemes for specific STM publishers.