University Presses Told to Raise Their Profile

by Sarah Gold -- Publishers Weekly, 6/18/2007 1:34:00 PM

Two former high ranking executives at major publishers told officials at university presses that they need to make their presses critical to their university’s overall mission if they don’t want to be ignored by their parent institution. The remarks, from Joseph Esposito, founder of the consulting firm Portable CEO and a former executive at Simon & Schuster and Random House, and Laura Brown, one-time president of Oxford USA and author of a forthcoming report on university presses in the digital age, came at the opening session of this year’s annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, held in Minneapolis from June 14 through June 17.

Brown observed that, "No business flourishes when its owners don’t care about it." Seeing how the press can fit into the university’s strategic plan, reinforcing the school’s "brand," providing professional development to faculty and working with campus libraries to exploit their technical skill were among the steps the speakers recommended that presses take to reinforce their value. Esposito went further in suggesting the press should be involved in "licensing the university’s knowledge."

In an age of diminishing university subsidies to their presses, Brown and Esposito both emphasized the value of being self-supporting, partly, in Esposito’s words, "to stay one step ahead of the ax," but also, he said, "to make money available for other central activities at the university."

Asked about the most innovative scholarly publishing projects of the last five years, both speakers highlighted Web-based projects: Oxford Scholarship Online and the wiki-based Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Internet was a key feature of other sessions, on subjects from blogging to marketing. Amazon received high praise from several marketing people for its effectiveness in selling university press titles. On the relatively rare occasion when major publicity hits a UP title, said Michael Baron, Cambridge’s assistant sales manager, "Amazon is the institution that’s ready to sell," with their enormous title selection and the ability to restock more quickly than chains.

The incoming AAUP president, Sandy Thatcher, director of Penn State University Press, announced an ambitious agenda for the coming year, including beginning to implement the recently adopted strategic plan; forming a task force to improve communications between book and journal staffs; and looking at the "irrational and dysfunctional" system that makes faculty tenure dependent on the increasingly unprofitable business of monographs based on dissertations.

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