On working at a university press

When I’m feeling positive, I believe that university press staffs will find their way through the talk of finding a business model that allows us to stay in business and that allows scholars open access to the work of their colleagues. I believe that we’ll settle on some methods that will work well to sustain us. When I’m feeling overwhelmed by home (washing baby bottles, cooking food a three-year-old will eat) or work, I feel a little beaten down about the lack of change in university presses as a whole. I get it, of course. As at other presses, at mine we’re focused on the day-to-day work of publishing books–an effort that doesn’t leave a lot of time for abstract thinking and planning. I volunteered to lead my press’s effort into figuring things out, but so far I haven’t made enough time for it, being so bogged down by my “regular” work.

When I’m feeling positive, I find my own excuses very irritating. I have read for years about the changes in scholarly book publishing, and that subject is what motivated me to get a master’s in library and information science. So if I know something about what we need to do, I shouldn’t let anything stop me and I should get to work on our methods.

The solution seems obvious: university presses should publish hyperlinked scholarship online for “free.” It’s really neither that obvious or that simple, of course. Note the quotes around “free.” Note the lack of funds forthcoming from our administrations to support “free.” Note the growing list of expensive-to-produce regional books we’d have to sell in large quantities to support “free.” Note the lack of staff experienced in converting and tagging Microsoft Word documents and knowledgeable about creating XML-authoring systems.

What the Ithaca Report made clear, what researchers have been saying for years, and what university press leadership generally believes is that our university administrations need to play an important role in any macro-level changes university presses make. Most of all our libraries need to be involved. Ours is willing to be, and I’m supposed to be forwarding that relationship. As with presses, some libraries are more “advanced” than others. Harvard just mandated that its faculty must submit their published journal articles to its repository to be made available with open access, which means that Harvard faculty can only publish in journals that allow postprints. Wayne has a repository, but it is undermarketed and underutilized, and its use is not mandatory.

One of the first decisions we need to make, one that isn’t often discussed, is what kind of books we want to publish as objects and what kind of books we want to publish as information. When I was purely an editorial manager at Wayne, it was easy for me to value books purely as text that conveyed research and perspective. Now that I’m also responsible for design and production, I want our books to look good. Whereas before I believed that design was a vehicle for a clear and well-constructed argument, now I have a much better grip on the reality that authors, staff members, and, presumably, book buyers and readers want books to look and feel beautiful.

I’m feeling positive today. Writing about the challenge of addressing the challenges university presses face is motivating me to do some work on my goal of finding a way for Wayne State University Press and Wayne State University Libraries to work together that combines our publishing knowledge and the libraries’ IT and cataloging infrastructure and that keeps us both relevant and responsible to our universities, to the Detroit metro community, and to the readers of our books.