What Was a University Press?
W hat Was a University Press?
Doug Armato 0
0 University of Minnesota Press , USA
Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation
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Column Editor’s Note: These two pieces
were originally delivered as part of a plenary
session at the 2012 Charleston Conference,
and they are worth running in ATG because
they eloquently highlight the evolution and
current transformations of university press
publishing. — LS
Tthe Association of American
Univerhis year marks the 75th anniversary of
sity Presses, or the AAUP.
Collaboration among university presses began as early as
the 1920s, with discussions of a joint catalog,
and an organized meeting in 1928 included
representatives from Columbia, Harvard,
Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, North
Carolina, Duke, Chicago, Pennsylvania,
Stanford, and Oxford. According to a recent
history of the AAUP, at that meeting,
“Cooperation among university presses was
born amongst the luxurious surroundings of
the original Waldorf-Astoria. When the Hotel
Pennsylvania and the Commodore proved
too expensive, someone negotiated a rate of
$6/single or $9/double at one of the world’s
most famous hotels. The organizers were quite
pleased — University of Pennsylvania Press
director Phelps Soule confessed a long-held
‘ambition to lunch someday at the Waldorf,
as it looks very grand from the top of the Fifth
Avenue Bus.’”
I mention this to emphasize that the vast
majority of modern university presses are
nonprofit entities and have a long and
illustrious history of thrift.
Fast forward to the year 2012, which finds
university presses at a moment of scrutiny as
well as exploration. Money and mission are
both equally on our minds as press directors,
as the former makes the fulfillment of the latter
possible. Though our missions as scholarly
publishers have not changed significantly in the
last 75 years, the path to arrive at that nirvana
known as “breakeven status” has changed
significantly, and many would argue that they’re
not even sure where that path is anymore, or
that now there are different paths for different
types of university presses.
So before our main speakers Doug Armato
and Alison Mudditt examine university press
publishing in the past, present, and future, there
are a few things I’d like you to know about
university presses. As I’ve mentioned, we are
nonprofits, and very different from commercial
academic publishers. (Though as a colleague
of mine at another press will say when an
author asks him for something really outside of
the scope of his budget, “Hey, we’re not that
not-for-profit”). Most of us depend on our
home universities for some sort of institutional
allocation to get to breakeven. According to
the February 2012 AAUP Operating Statistics
From A University Press — The Twenty-First Century
University Press: Assessing the Past, Envisioning the Future
Column Editor: Leila W. Salisbury (Director, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS 39211; Phone: 601-432-6205)
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report, those presses with net sales in the
$1.56M range receive host institution support
averaging 10-20% of net sales. Very small presses
often receive more; larger presses receive
significantly less. But what these numbers
mean is that 80-90% of operating income for
most university presses is generated primarily
through sales and grants.
As is true of libraries, even though we are
all university presses, we are not the same.
What works well for one press may not easily
translate for the rest of us. As my marketing
director is fond of saying, turning Tolstoy’s
famous pronouncement on its head: “Unhappy
presses are all alike; every happy press is happy
in its own way.” Though we may have each
taken our own paths to getting there, nearly
all university presses do publish electronic
content and are making it a priority. The great
majority of us are placing that content with the
vendors and platforms you use in your libraries,
and we are constantly reevaluating business
strategies and avenues for content discovery
and dissemination.
Countless articles and blogs have been
written about the so-called crisis in scholarly
communication. Some of these writers portray
university presses as antiquated operations that
are resistant to change and that don’t care about
— or are unable to meet the needs of — modern
users. I have two immediate responses to this.
First, I believe this happens, in part, because
we as university presses haven’t always done a
good job of explaining our value and promoting
that message to our stakeholders, which include
our campuses, libraries, scholarly societies,
authors, administrators, and faculty. Truly
connecting with your constituents is a very
powerful thing and should be done at every
possible opportunity. I was fortunate enough
to recently spend an hour with one of the
Mississippi university presidents, talking about our
press’s work and exploring the many ways in
which the press’s (...truncated)