PLS celebrates 40th anniversary and £500m milestone

Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its creation in September 2021, having passed the milestone of £500m in collective licensing distributions to publishers.  

The organisation is marking the occasion with a party in London on 8th September, and the publication of its history. It charts PLS’ origins and launch in 1981 by three leading trade bodies—the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers and the Professional Publishers Association—which continue to direct it, alongside the Independent Publishers Guild, which became a member in 2015.  

PLS was created to co-ordinate appropriate remuneration for book, journal and magazine publishers on a collective licensing basis for the copying of extracts of their content. Since 1981, PLS has distributed more than £500m to more than 4,000 publishers. Annual distributions have exceeded £30m every year since 2011 and reached a record £38.6m in 2020, with PLS able to allocate and pay nearly 99% of revenues collected to the correct rights-holders of content that is copied.  

PLS c.e.o. Sarah Faulder said: “We are thrilled to be celebrating 40 years of service in publishing. The industry has changed dramatically since we started our work, but our core responsibility to help publishers secure proper reward for the secondary use of their content remains just as important today as it was in 1981. We are proud to have distributed more than half a billion pounds in our first 40 years— money that continues to sustain publishing businesses, create jobs and power innovation.”