How Does the University Press Remain Relevant? | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... How does the business of university press publishing remain relevant today, when so many forces seem to be moving in a different, though not always opposing, direction? To the author who successfully landed a contract with a university press, watched eagerly as the first notices began to appear, and then went before an academic committee, who cited the book in the granting of tenure, the issue of relevance must seem bizarre. But not so, or not always so, in the cramped offices of the publishers themselves. While we can find exceptions to virtually any rule (I am taking bets on a specific individual appearing shortly in the comments section of this blog), many press people feel that they have been neglected by their institutions and sometimes the world beyond that. The administration may fail to mete out essential financial support, and in a few instances that I have observed, seems to want to will their presses away by placing them in wholly inadequate office space often far from campus–all this while capital campaigns go forth to build more facilities for the scientific disciplines. Meanwhile the marketplace has not become friendlier, as libraries buy fewer books, at least from university presses, and many that they do buy are steeply discounted aggregations and cut-rate short-term rentals. (I learned this week that some libraries have had the audacity to put records for demand-driven acquisition titles into WorldCat, making it seem that the libraries owns books that in fact they don’t.) Adding insult to injury, some libraries have established their own publishing programs, which are typically not held accountable to the market-based requirements that administrations impose on presses. Outside the academy the yahoos of the political class denigrate humanities education, where university presses provide the principal credentialing function. (University presses collectively publish about 5,000 monographs a year, 80% of which are in the humanities.) Some readers of this blog know many people with advanced degrees in the sciences who have not been able to obtain jobs in their fields, but, yes, we do have to reform education in the U.S. Let’s start with the legislature ..."