At Meeting of University Presses, the Future Presses In - Publishing - The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Be part of the conversation, mind your metadata, and use technology as a bridge to the world: That advice animated sessions at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, held here this week. This year marks the group's 75th anniversary, and attendance hit a record high, with 787 people registered. People talked somberly about the news that the University of Missouri plans to shut down its press. But so far Missouri has been the exception, not the rule. Most presses have survived the recession and budget cuts. Some, like Princeton University Press, had excellent years, according to Peter Dougherty, the Princeton press's director and the new president of the association. In a lunchtime address, Mr. Dougherty kept clear of gloom, imagining a robust future for scholarly publishers. He called on the group's members to build what he called ‘the global university press.’ Rising literacy is building a worldwide marketplace, he said, and the spread of technology ‘will make our content available everywhere.’ In Mr. Dougherty's vision, technology changes but books remain essential. ‘In a digital culture that granulates knowledge, books synthesize it,’ he told the audience...‘ ‘When we think of markets for our books, we tend to look beyond U.S. borders...’ The association and its member presses have work to do at home before they can make the most of a global market. As usual, the meeting served up many sessions on the technical side of publishing, with panels on ‘Making Your Metadata Better’—’Metadata is marketing,’ as a panelist at another session said—and on ‘E-Book Nuts and Bolts.’ Later this summer, some university presses will see their first checks from UPCC, the new e-book consortium run by Project MUSE. Another e-book platform, Books at JSTOR, should go live in November. The shifting human element was on people's minds, too. MaryKatherine Callaway, director of Louisiana State University Press, just finished her term as the group's president. In her farewell address, she noted that several press leaders will step down this year... issues include the push and pull between academic libraries and publishers over copyright and fair use. One session dug into the recent ruling in the lawsuit that pitted Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and SAGE against Georgia State University... Linda Steinman, a partner with the firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, broke down what she called the judge's ‘cockamamie math’ and explained how her application of the standard fair-use tests worked against publishers... After the Georgia State ruling, ‘you're safer’ having licensing options in place to make widespread, unauthorized copying harder, she told the crowd. A show of hands revealed that many presses don't have e-licensing arrangements yet. Still, audience members said, permissions revenue makes a difference—enough to pay for a staff job here or a couple of monographs there. But licensing can cost presses too, according to one librarian attending the session. Mike Furlough, the associate dean for research and scholarly communication at Penn State University Libraries, said his institution pays a six-figure fee to the CCC. That money comes out of the collections budget, he said, which means fewer dollars to spend on new content from university presses...” Other sessions brought attendees up to speed on recent, often fierce debates about public access to research... A panel on ‘Policy Wars: University Presses in the Crossfire’ made it clear that such debates aren't Washington abstractions; they have serious implications for university presses... Janet Rabinowich, the director of Indiana University Press, told a story about how policy issues can hit close to home. After The Chronicle ran an article on the Research Works Act and many publishers' opposition to public-access mandates, Ms. Rabinowich said, she was challenged by an influential administrator about whether the university-press association was on the wrong side of the fight to make scholarship more easily accessible. (The group said it opposed the Research Works Act but also objected to the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public-access mandates.) The administrator told her the university couldn't support a publishing operation ‘that basically consorts with the enemy,’ she said. After more conversation, the threat subsided, but ‘it did bring to the fore the larger issue of the role the press can/does/should play in advancing the values of the university,’ Ms. Rabinowich said.”