The Bucknell and Rutgers University Presses don’t fit the profile of obvious partners. One serves a small, private institution in Pennsylvania; the other is part of New Jersey’s nearly 70,000-student state university system. Bucknell’s press, one of only a handful of university presses operated by a liberal-arts college, is best known for publishing books on Iberian, Latin American, Irish, and 18th-century studies. Rutgers’s press publishes in law, medicine, social sciences, and film and media studies. The two rarely cross paths, and they rarely compete.
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The Bucknell and Rutgers University Presses don’t fit the profile of obvious partners. One serves a small, private institution in Pennsylvania; the other is part of New Jersey’s nearly 70,000-student state university system. Bucknell’s press, one of only a handful of university presses operated by a liberal-arts college, is best known for publishing books on Iberian, Latin American, Irish, and 18th-century studies. Rutgers’s press publishes in law, medicine, social sciences, and film and media studies. The two rarely cross paths, and they rarely compete.
Yet they are combining forces, and their directors say the decision to do so makes sense at a time when university presses need to collaborate to survive.
“In our own small way, we’re trying to use the respective strengths of Rutgers and Bucknell to make an entity that’s larger than the sum of its parts,” said Greg Clingham, director of Bucknell University Press.
Under an agreement announced this month, Rutgers University Press will take over printing, marketing, and sales for Bucknell University Press’s books, Mr. Clingham said. Bucknell will maintain its imprint and continue to acquire and edit its books. Once the expenses for the cost of the sale of Bucknell’s books are paid by Rutgers, Bucknell will receive a royalty from its books’ profits.
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From Rutgers’s perspective, the partnership gives its press more books to sell, allowing it to potentially bargain for better prices from companies that handle printing and typesetting, for example. It also broadens Rutgers’s visibility as a publisher into fields where it did not previously have a big presence.
“We can work together to expand our profiles,” said Micah Kleit, director of Rutgers University Press. “It allows us to cushion some of the risks involved.”
University presses have been laboring under financial and other challenges in recent years and to prove their worth to their host institutions even as they feel their resources thinning. Just about every press — the Association of American University Presses has over 140 members — has outsourced some part of its organization to reduce costs. In some cases, university presses are combining forces, hoping they will see greater visibility and pricing advantages by collaborating.
Bucknell’s press has been working through another collaboration with the for-profit publisher Rowman & Littlefield, as do the University of Delaware Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and Lehigh University Press. Mr. Clingham said Bucknell is switching to Rutgers for both philosophical and financial reasons. As a university press, Rutgers values peer review and rigorous scholarship and will allow Bucknell to sell its books at a lower price than the for-profit publisher.
By selling its books for less, Bucknell will be able to market them to individuals, Mr. Clingham said. Forty years ago, there were about 1,500 libraries that would buy scholarly books, he estimated. Now, 200 libraries might buy a particular book, making it important to be able to sell books to individuals.
“The way in which successful university presses operate is to put together a whole series of slightly different, overlapping audiences as a way of pitching their books,” Mr. Clingham said.
Economies of Scale
The arrangement is unusual, but not entirely unique. While many university presses have agreements to share the cost of distributing books, it’s less common to share production costs, said Richard Brown, director of Georgetown University Press.
“Subsidies to universities presses seem to be tightening up,” Mr. Brown said. Many university presses are looking for “a way to buy economies of scale and reduce costs by working collaboratively.”
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But combining production may come with some challenges, Mr. Brown said. He was not aware of other publishers pursuing agreements similar to the one reached by Bucknell and Rutgers.
“Presses tend to have their own ways of doing things, their own style,” he said. “I think it will be hard to convince presses to give up their own unique ways of producing books.”
Mr. Clingham said that when considering the partnership with Rutgers, he spoke to the director of the University Press of Colorado, another consortium. That press was founded in 1965 as a cooperative nonprofit that is supported by nine universities, including Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the University of Colorado. In 2012, the press agreed to merge with Utah State University Press. The Utah State press retained its own imprint, though all production costs are shared.
“We pursued it because both of us independently were pretty small companies,” Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, said of the merger with the Utah State press. “It allowed us to gain some advantages of greater scale that neither one of us had independently.”
The staff work out of three separate offices, but all for one company, Mr. Pratt said. Two acquiring editors each mainly focus on one of the imprints, but the rest of the staff work on books from both legacy presses. He said the two imprints have been able to maintain their distinct identities despite the combination.
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“You can maintain that brand of one and allow the other to do the work that is less central to the brand itself,” he said.
Growth is hard. You have to publish more. One way to do that is to add partnerships.
Another well known university press consortium is the University Press of New England, which was founded in 1970 and is supported by Dartmouth College and Brandeis University, among others. Mr. Kleit said he also believed that consortium has been successful.
University presses have to constantly demonstrate their relevance and value to their home institutions, Mr. Kleit said. A good way to do that is by expanding the business.
“Growth is hard,” Mr. Kleit said. “You have to publish more. One way to do that is to add partnerships.”
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Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.