Just how much work goes into every book and how many hands touch each project. —Justin Race
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That the only cost of making a book, for example, is the cost of paper, printing, and binding. We peer review, we develop, we copy-edit, we proofread, we design, we typeset, we market, we sell, we submit for awards, we sell subsidiary rights, we manage permissions requests, etc. So just producing a book digitally does not make it free, but I am constantly amazed at how many people believe just that. —Darrin Pratt
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They think that the marketing and promotional budgets at university presses are just slightly less than today’s cost to produce a feature film with A-list actors. —Bruce Austin
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Publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders share their views on the state and future of academic publishing.
That it is a moral imperative to make information free, regardless of the investment in curation. I’ve had too many contentious discussions with faculty when I try to explain that we don’t have the funding to support their open-access desires. “Well I can get $3,000 from the library or provost.” That’s great, but the book cost $30,000 to publish. It’s not personal. It’s not greed or a difference of philosophies. Idealistically, I believe everything should be for free (food, shelter, health care, etc.). But we can’t lose $27,000 on every book for the sake of a mission. I’m a not-for-profit, but I’m not that not-for-profit. —James McCoy
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That electronic is free and solves all problems. The exact opposite is the truth: Electronic is 120 percent of cost and creates more difficulties. —Carey Newman
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I don’t think they realize there’s a big push for transformation — one that might, for example, move the cost of publishing away from a book’s customers and toward the author’s employer. That would dramatically restrict the pool of potential authors, since many don’t work for universities that can afford to pay to publish their faculty’s books, or may not be on the tenure track at all. —Derek Krissoff
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That there is some clear relationship between the reputation of an institution and the quality of materials published by a press that it sponsors.
The quality of a press’s output is primarily a function of excellence in peer review. Peer review shouldn’t be a black-box phenomenon. What it means to be scholarly, regardless of which press is publishing a book, is that (a) the work was reviewed and (b) the nature of the review is made plain to the reader. But when, if ever, does a university press disclose to the reader information about evaluation the work has undergone?
There are straightforward ways to address this: (a) a clear and public disclosure of what we mean when we say “double-blind,” “single-blind,” “peer-to-peer,” “open,” etc.; (b) a disclosure of what object was reviewed (The proposal? The proposal and a sample chapter? The entire manuscript?); and (c) a clear signaling system, much like that which the Creative Commons system of icons performs in the area of rights, to make clear to the reader the review process employed in a given work. By making clear the nature and substance of the peer review each work has undergone, such a system would level the playing field among presses — and make clear the distinct value of what they do. —Mark Edington
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That individual university presses primarily publish books written by their host institution’s faculty.
—John Byram
That we’re all the same. We come in all varieties and have different emphases. When looking to publish with a university press, authors need to think about fit and not name. — Joyce Harrison
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That we’re either textbook publishers or driven by profit motives. —Dennis Lloyd
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That university presses can continue to publish in fields in which publication is not supported by the disciplines — that is, in fields where scholars don’t purchase one another’s books. —Eric Halpern
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That they are in the business of publishing revised dissertations. —Laurie Matheson
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That they are dumping stations for unreadable pseudoscholarship. —Lindsay Waters
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That millions of people will read their book. —Beatrice Rehl
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That there is little interest among the general public in the works released by university presses, and so scholars seek other publishing venues. —Julia M. Gelfand
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That university-press books don’t get read. While sales have declined in recent years, readership and usage of our books has skyrocketed. Because books have been slower in their move to digital availability than journals, it has taken longer for usage to be recognized, but popular online platforms like Project Muse and JSTOR are reporting anecdotally that book chapters are often more accessed than journal articles. —Charles Watkinson
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Authors don’t understand that presses develop their lists to become strong in some areas and not others — and try to build on those profiles with every new acquisition. That means that many excellent books get turned down because they don’t “fit” the list. —Jennifer Crewe
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That we are old-fashioned, out of date, print-only publishers, that we have reluctantly joined the digital revolution, and that we produce only monographs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Are we risk averse? Only insofar as our budgets dictate. —Meredith Babb
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As a rule authors don’t have an understanding of the publishing process and financial constraints. That’s not their fault; it’s ours. We have not done an adequate job educating authors and editors about what goes on inside the black box.—Richard Brown
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The biggest misperception to me is that it is somehow less than desirable, or questionable, for a scholar to publish with their own institution’s press. —Jane Ferreyra
