Despite Differences, University Libraries and Presses Partner More Often

"When Purdue University Press was brought under the wing of the university’s library in 2009, it was a marriage of necessity, brought on by the flagging financial fortunes of the press. Since being absorbed into the library in 2009, the press has moved from reporting to library administrators to participating in planning with them, said Dean of Libraries James Mullins at a recent conference sponsored by education non-profit Ithaka. Purdue is one of a growing number of universities and colleges across the country where the in-house press and library are working more closely together, offering a glimpse into the possible future of academic publishing. In 2009, financial concerns, including unpaid royalties, forced a bailout of Purdue’s in-house press, which saw its business operations taken over by the library. Several years on, the new partnership with the library has righted the ship, accounting-wise. But perhaps even more importantly, it has also helped Purdue’s press rethink how it presents things like datasets in its publications. 'Our authors are very interested in enriching their publications with additional digital content,' said Purdue University Press director Charles Watkinson. 'Because the library is one of the core places to create data repositories for institutions, we’re able to link to those more easily, and that’s an area where we’ve had success.' Along with new technologically driven opportunities, there is also a distinctly old-school  benefit to bringing together the library and the university press, said Watkinson, in that it makes the press feel like more of a part of the campus community than it has in the past ... That’s led not only to closer collaboration with faculty, but also with students, resulting in the Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research (JPUR), an open access look at research done by some of Purdue’s youngest and brightest students ... It’s a learning process that more and more academic libraries are engaging in, though, as demonstrated by the recently released Library Publishing Directory, a guide to more than 100 library publishing ventures around the world, many of which include collaborations with university presses. In the directory the Library Publishing Coalition details what each one is doing and provides an overview of the burgeoning industry as a whole ... University presses aren’t the only ones looking to partner with academic libraries, either.  Publishing collaborative BioOne is partnering with the libraries of Dartmouth University and other universities across the United States to launch Elementa, an online, open access journal focusing on the science of climate change and sustainability from a variety of angles ... Some other universities, though, are taking a different approach, building their presses from the ground up within an existing library framework. Amherst University, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, is creating a press within its walls that is devoted to open access. The decision to build a new press from scratch was prompted by the frustration that Amherst librarians felt at the current state of academic publishing. 'We were convinced that you couldn’t build a system much worse than the one we have right now,' said Amherst librarian Bryn Geffert ... "