As Umberto Eco says, there are some things you can’t reinvent. Spoons, wheels, books. But university presses will change. I predict that the biggest change in the university-press world will not be the effects of some e-pocalypse or even the advent of open access; the biggest transformation will be that university presses begin to serve their own home institutions with university-based publishing. —Carey Newman
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Presses will be even more tightly integrated with and valued by their home institutions, with formal programs to support faculty and student needs. —Mary Rose Muccie
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Publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders share their views on the state and future of academic publishing.
There will be 20 to 25 big university presses serving global markets, while many of the smaller state-university presses will be absorbed by their host-university libraries, doing mainly digital publishing. —Peter J. Dougherty
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Much the same.—Joshua Gans
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Much of what we publish is not immersive reading but “extractable” research, meaning that readers often dip into our books (and journals and online products) looking for specific information rather than reading from acknowledgments to epilogue. This baseline utility will remain the same, with presses serving as a filter and as an agent of improvement and effective dissemination. —Niko Pfund
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Not terribly different. Books and scholarship have been around forever; the prediction that they’re in danger of going extinct has been around almost as long.—Justin Race
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The pace of change in this business has always been glacial, with innovations having an impact gradually or in discrete areas. Unless authors and readers dramatically lose support for long-form narrative as a significant method of scholarly information exchange, there will always be a niche for university presses in academe.—John Byram
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I think they will have changed more slowly than we would have hoped, though we are likely to see them embrace an increasing variety of forms of scholarly argument. —Matthew K. Gold
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That very much depends on financial decisions made at parent institutions and in state legislatures. At present, there isn’t much to feel confident about.—David Rosenbaum
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The funding models for university presses will be more robust, and a greater proportion of their products will be open access. The formats in which presses publish will go far beyond the constraints of the book to present interactive, web-based projects with lots of multimedia. —Charles Watkinson
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I’m more concerned with what presses will look like next year and the year after. There are some pretty dramatic market and academic factors right now. Twenty years might as well be 120 years from now. This is an enormously crucial time. —James McCoy
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If fair-use practices continue to expand in ways that starve authors and publishers, it will be more and more difficult for publishers to thrive in a market-based system. —Laurie Matheson
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If climate models are accurate, I think we will be underwater. —Greg Britton
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Presses that flourish will be doing other things besides pumping out monographs and journals. They will be truly entrepreneurial. They will strategize about moon shots, and they will involve university administrators and librarians and technologists on their campuses. And I believe, strongly, that successful university presses will have aligned their editorial programs with the strengths of their parent institutions. —Richard Brown
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In 20 years we’ll see a new wave of university-press directors who learned the ropes grappling with digital formats and production, open access, and metadata. And they’ll be asked to use their skills to disseminate the fruits of scholarly research in new ways. —Dennis Lloyd
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I envision a world that has moved beyond PDF to fully embrace the enhanced monograph and its textual, multimedia, and data-rich components. Peer review will be conducted on the fly amongst digital communities, and versions will be released along the way and updated. Six-month publishing cycles will be the norm. Presses will collaborate and share services. Print will continue to survive. —Dean J. Smith
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It may be that our books will get shorter because as readers deal with so many sources of short-form information on a daily basis, they are finding it harder to read long books. —Jennifer Crewe
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We will publish interactive holograms of gigantic databases in open-access format, algorithmically keyed to the existence in potential users of the gene for a high threshold of boredom. But most of our work will still be to produce hardcover books in which professors organize complicated thoughts in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Editors will wear jet packs. — Ian Malcolm
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Algorithms developed at Amazon and Netflix will do the work of acquisitions editors. Software will read manuscripts and proposals, crowdsource reviews from bot-peers, issue 100-page end-user-license-agreement-style contracts that authors are expected to sign without reading, and track attendees at academic conferences. Tenure and advancement will depend entirely on bibliometrics, and click-baited articles (“you won’t believe the way this weird fish reproduces”) will overtake Google Scholar. Presses will be mere brands, prestige labels applied by opaque filtering mechanisms, facades without buildings or staff. (Whether this scenario strikes you as dystopian or utopian probably depends on where you feed in the current ecosystem.) —Gita Devi Manaktala
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My hope is that we have more (socially aware) minorities working in scholarly publishing. But my fear is that there will be fewer presses in general, especially given the current climate of cutting important things like public education and arts and humanities funding. Mostly, however, things will be the same, except we’ll have cooler haircuts and report to our Martian overlords once a week. —Ranjit Arab
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The real question is: What is the university going to look like 20 years from now? Scholarly publishing is highly dependent on what happens in the university. Changes in curriculum, research/scholarly outputs, and credentialing norms, among other variables, will affect university presses. Watch this space.—Beatrice Rehl
