Among Calls for Collaboration, a Plea to Reinvent University Presses

By Sarah Gold -- Publishers Weekly, 6/22/2009 9:14:00 AM

Collaboration and cooperation were the bywords at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses in Philadelphia, June 18-21, while a call for radical change of a “broken” business model came from the AAUP’s outgoing president, Alex Holzman, who urged presses to embrace a comprehensive e-book publishing program.

Numerous sessions with titles such as “Library-Press Cooperation,” “University and Press Collaborations” and “The Mellon Collaborative Publishing Grants: Reports from the Presses,” underscored Holzman’s point that today’s university press business model—plagued by declining monograph sales, heavy returns and declining subsidies from parent institutions—is in need of serious revisions, which speakers saw as involving closer ties with other academic departments and institutes within the parent institution.

As Nathan MacBrien, publications director for the University of California’s International and Area Studies, put it, at a time when every academic department, including university presses, must justify its existence, “collaborations make for institutional embeddedness” that can help guarantee a press’s future

Speakers also addressed other forms of cooperation: allying with campus libraries (to which some presses are already institutionally joined at the hip) and working with other university presses with complementary strengths or overlapping interests to accomplish complex projects and achieve cost savings.

At Friday’s opening plenary, Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, called such collaborations a natural, organic transformation that are “already well under way.” Panelists at several sessions presented collaborations that are currently in progress. Laura Cerruti, director of digital content development at the University of California Press, described UC Publishing Services, in which the press partners with UC Digital Library to assist various entities throughout the UC system that publish on a small scale; while these books do not carry the UC Press imprint, they benefit from the press’s marketing, distribution and promotion capabilities, as well as digitization by the library.

But outgoing AAUP president and Temple University Press director Holzman, addressing the roughly 465 attendees, proposed a more radical transformation to ensure the survival of university presses. Citing 90% returns at his press in March, he said, “Don’t try to fix the old system. Let’s invent a new one”—an e-book based model, backed up by print-on-demand. Holzman said the benefits—such as eliminating returns and used-book sales—could outweigh whatever costs and challenges the transition might present. (Holzman did not, however, endorse the University of Michigan model of moving toward digital-only monograph publication while incorporating the library.)

Despite the emphasis on cooperation, there were occasional hints of residual tensions among the presses, university administrators and libraries. At a session called “University and Press Collaborations,” moderator B. Byron Price, director of the University of Oklahoma Press, asked panelists about such tensions. Penn State Press’s Patrick Alexander, referring to the fact that the session was being recorded, declined to answer.

The final plenary, on Saturday afternoon, explored experiments in the highly controversial area of open-access publishing, primarily of journal articles. Among others, Ivy Anderson explained the California Digital Library’s recent open-access arrangement with Springer’s journals, though overall there was perhaps more boosterism than details on a sustainable business model.

At a session on open-access digital repositories at Harvard, MIT and Penn State, an audience member asked about studies on whether such repositories are saving campus libraries the cost of buying back faculty scholarship in the form of expensive journals; Amy Brands of Harvard said no such studies have been done, but that such cost savings are not one of the Harvard repository’s goals

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