What Do (University Press) Authors Want? Results of an Author Survey of University of Michigan Press Authors

"The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is a midsize member of the Association of University Presses, one of around 100 institutional publishers in the USA with the designation “university press.” Focusing on publishing books in a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines, UMP also has a strategic focus on innovative publishing models. UMP is particularly focused on the development of digital scholarship and expanding knowledge dissemination through open access. 

To better meet these new strategic initiatives, UMP administration and staff wanted to better understand what they publish. Do author expectations match with the Press’s strategy? To answer this question I asked recently published authors and volume editors what their preferences are when choosing a monograph publisher, and how working with UMP aligned (or did not align) with those preferences. those preferences....

The 14% of respondents that viewed the opportunity to publish Open Access as influential was surprisingly low, even though UMP has been a leader in expanding its open access publishing. For example, the University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission program makes 75% (in 2022 it was 50%, in 2023 it was 75%) of the new scholarly books it publishes each year Open Access without requiring authors to pay thanks to the support of the U-M Provost and libraries that purchase UMP EBC. However, it is clear that open access falls way below the opportunity to publish with the best press in authors’ hierarchy of needs...."