SAGE at 45 – a letter from Sara Miller McCune

Sara Miller McCune

Dear employees, authors, editors, societies and other partners,

On the 45^th anniversary of the founding of SAGE, I wanted to share with you – the SAGE community – my thoughts and reflections on the company that I started back in 1965 and that together we have helped succeed beyond George’s and my greatest expectations.

It was not business as usual for a woman in that era to set out to create her own publishing company. The fact that I was 25 years old made it rather more audacious. But today, with nearly 1,000 employees from Los Angeles to London, New Delhi to Singapore, and Washington DC to Beijing, the strength of the idea that is SAGE is unassailable.

Sara in the early days of SAGE

The driving force of SAGE has always been the publishing of true scholarship – the generation of original ideas, rigorous analysis and primary measurable research that serves not only the academic community, but filters down to the world at large through teaching and public policy. We believe that publishing engaged scholarship truly changes the way in which we look at the world.

We are today a leading publisher across the social sciences, have a strong and growing portfolio of science, technology and medicine journals, and have been at the forefront of many areas of inquiry, including evaluation and qualitative methods. Our Corwin imprint, which celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year, has published hundreds of titles that provide K-12 educators the tools they need to better prepare young people for success. Our CQ Press division, which became a part of the SAGE family in 2008, has been the first source for information about politics, policy, and people for more than 50 years.

A key part of our success is that SAGE has always been managed by publishers. We hire employees who are as passionate, energetic and engaged as are the people and organizations who look to us for support and dissemination of their ideas and aspirations. We believe that publishing is fundamentally a people business.

SAGE is the last major independent academic and professional publisher and I intend for it to remain so. Our unique niche between the big conglomerates and the small university presses has led us to become the natural home for thousands of book authors, journal editors and societies and associations. I have set up my estate plan so this company cannot be sold, even after my death, except under extreme and unforeseen circumstances.

It is fitting that this anniversary year sees SAGE launch two innovative electronic initiatives – the next generation of the award-winning SAGE Journals Online, and SAGE Research Methods Online, an exciting tool which leverages the power of online delivery with more than 100,000 pages of SAGE research methods content.

Thank you for joining me these past 45 years and helping make SAGE the remarkable company and community that it is. I look forward to many more shared anniversaries as together we successfully navigate the evolving publishing landscape.

Sincerely,

Sara Miller McCune

Founder and Executive Chairman, SAGE