What Was a University Press?

Against the Grain, Jul 2016

By Doug Armato, Published on 07/14/16

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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 - 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) <> 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)


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Doug Armato. What Was a University Press?, Against the Grain, 2016, Volume 24, Issue 6,