Prestigious scholarly publisher, the MIT Press recently embarked on a transformative project to implement BiblioSuite publishing software across its entire operations. Eliminating disparate technologies and siloed systems, this project will consolidate the Press’ books and journals workflows into a single, unified, fully-integrated system, increasing efficiency and productivity companywide.
The Challenge:
Before implementing BiblioSuite, the MIT Press managed their assets, metadata, and complex publishing workflows across six separate systems and databases: separate filemaker systems for journals and books respectively, assets stored on internal file servers as well as a third-party system, a third-party metadata and asset distribution relationship, a separate third-party royalty system, and various airtables and google sheets (on a user-by-user basis). Limited integration between the Press' systems led to a lack of data and asset visibility hindering both in-house accessibility and their dissemination to third parties, and manual processes including duplicate data entry drained the Press’ internal resources.
The considerable costs involved in running and maintaining multiple systems, coupled with the substantial time and labor required to consolidate and report on the data internally, lead to a decision to change course.
The Solution:
In a strategic move to overcome these hurdles, the MIT Press selected BiblioSuite’s Product Management, Production, Digital Asset Management, Contracts, Rights, Royalties and Sales Analysis workflows, plus the Royalty Portal, to revolutionize its operations for the full publishing lifecycle. By consolidating six systems into a single, comprehensive solution, the MIT Press will streamline its workflows to increase efficiencies companywide, saving time and resources with BiblioSuite’s:
Streamlined workflows that enable the team to simplify their processes across all departments, synchronization across related products to eliminate manual tasks and redundant data entry, and empowering staff to focus on core activities rather than administrative overhead.
Integrated asset and metadata management for any product, including books, journals and journal articles, all held within a single system that ensures accuracy and consistency across the Press’ entire catalog, and facilitates submission tracking for acquisitions.
Enhanced visibility of changes to metadata, assets and contact data, stored and managed centrally to enable easy access—fostering collaboration and informed decision-making in-house.
Effective feed distribution that empowers the team to generate tailored ONIX feeds and reports, reducing the time spent managing metadata with distributors and ensuring the timely delivery of digital publications including e-books.
Centralized production management to better monitor and maintain schedules and costings for all products, increasing visibility and ownership of production workflows in-house, and automating repetitive tasks to optimize planning and meet deadlines more effectively.
Integrated marketing and publicity that enables the Press to plan, build, track and coordinate its activities across departments, encouraging contributions and maximizing the impact of the Press’ campaigns.
High speed royalties processing that expedites the management of subrights, permissions, and royalties for both physical and digital products, empowering staff to generate statement packs and reports on-demand, auto-send royalty statements, and eliminate time-consuming manual processes and royalties calculations for e-book collections purchased by libraries.
By embracing BiblioSuite, the MIT Press is future-proofing its business and unlocking new avenues for growth and innovation. In particular, BiblioSuite offers the Press the flexibility and scalability to optimize its workflows long into the future, ensuring its teams can meet new industry trends as and when they emerge for continued success.
If you’re interested in finding out more about this wide-scale project and will be attending the SSP 46th Annual Meeting in Boston this year, join us on 29th May 2024, 12:45pm-1:15pm EDT for our session: Technological Catalyst: Embracing Technology for Books and Journals in Scholarly Publishing. This session will spotlight reasons for optimizing workflows, unveil the motivations behind this ambitious technology project, and offer insight into managing your own. Attend to learn how you can usher in a new era of efficiency and collaboration within your own publishing house.
“BiblioSuite will consolidate our six pre-existing, disparate systems into a single, unified whole that will transform and invigorate our operations across the full publishing lifecycle. Providing our staff with a single source of truth across our entire catalog, Biblio will bring together our books and journals data, assets and workflows for the first time to fully streamline our processes and maximize efficiencies across the company. I’m excited for our migration and can’t wait to see how MITP can fully leverage BiblioSuite’s functionality. It’s going to be great!”
MF Gydus, Director of Business Systems & Operations, The MIT Press
“We’re excited to welcome the MIT Press to our esteemed community of university presses already leveraging BiblioSuite. This strategic partnership will modernize the Press’ workflows, equipping its teams with the scalable tools they need to adapt to emerging industry trends long into the future.”
Rodney Elder, EVP, North America, Virtusales Publishing Solutions
About the MIT Press
Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press books and journals are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design. The books and journals publishing programs embody the Press’ mission: to lead by pushing the boundaries of scholarly publishing in active partnership with the MIT community and aligned with MIT’s mission to advance knowledge in science, technology, the arts, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century.
About BiblioSuite
BiblioSuite is the most advanced suite of publishing software for optimizing workflows. It empowers publishers by enabling them to manage all their products – from books, journals and articles, to Open Access publications, eBooks, digital platforms and beyond – in a single system. Being content-led, the system allows publishers to fully utilize their IP and maximize their income (regardless of the publishing formats chosen).
BiblioSuite is proven to help publishing houses of all shapes and sizes to save time, reduce duplication of efforts and increase access to key information and documents company-wide. The only difficulty after implementing will be deciding what to do with the time you’ve freed up!
By choosing the BiblioSuite’s comprehensive system, your publishing house will be able to:
Manage multiple formats including books, eBooks, audiobooks, journals, OA publications, packs which include non-book products, merchandise and more;
Easily maintain high-quality metadata and enhanced ONIX feeds;
Create costings and schedules for production;
Raise purchase orders within the BiblioSuite system;
Manage submissions, advances, subsidiary rights income and third-party permissions;
Generate and authorize contracts with software that enables full rights management;
Handle complex royalty calculations and payments, using multiple currencies and generate statements on demand;
Improve operational performance, save money on excess stock, and spot new revenue streams;
Manage contacts, marketing and publicity in a single, comprehensive and integrated system;
Share review copies and reading samples digitally and securely with integrated digital asset management and distribution;
And much, much more.
Find out why you should join our growing community, and see what our client publishers have to say about BiblioSuite on our website: Publishing software for university presses.
About Virtusales Publishing Solutions
Virtusales is the creator of the industry-leading BiblioSuite publishing software. Working with some of the world's leading academic and scholarly, trade, children’s and novelty, educational and professional, content and licensing, and religious publishers – including Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury Academic, Kogan Page, Sage Publications, the World Health Organization, CABI and university presses: Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and many more – Virtusales is streamlining publishers' workflows and bringing efficiencies to their business processes with innovative software, exceptional service and a collaborative approach.
Our leading-edge, web-based technology, rapid development cycle of new functionality and close working relationships with our customers ensure that our client publishers are able to manage and adapt to the industry's challenges more efficiently, now and in the future.