From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 09:53:34 +0100

I'm not sure Anthony is right about 'most' learned societies publishing in
association with a larger (often commercial) publisher

When I checked the Ulrich's statistics in 2007, 8027 publishers were listed
with (socie*, socia*, institu* or istitu*) in the publisher field (another
3531 had (universi*)). 4994 of these combined groups were publishing active,
refereed scholarly journals. The average number of journals per publisher in
these two groups was just 2.42, which suggests to me (given that it includes
large UPs such as Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago etc) that many of them were
probably publishing only one title.

Sally


Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Email:  [log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2012 18:18:33 +0100

Sandy

I think you will find that most learned society publishers have a similar
publications committee which of course reflects the community they serve
rather than a single university. The majority of learned societies that
publish (I think I am right in saying) do so in partnership with a larger
publisher often a commercial publisher. That commercial publisher is
responsible as a publisher for books and journals that have the same level
of quality control. Of course as someone who has worked much of my life for
a commercial publisher I would argue that the quality controls I used and
which were demanded of me by a commercial organisation working through an
editorial committee or some such were just as rigorous as those which
involved my getting agreement from the Delegates of OUP. In both cases I
usually had control over the referees/reviewers I went to. I certainly would
not give any special preference for any reviewers from a particular
university or society and was thus able to get an international view and
avoid blackballs resulting from academic rivalries or preferences of
distinguished people for their colleagues or former students.

Anthony

*****************
From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2012 10:37:08 -0500

No commercial publisher has a faculty editorial board that is given the
responsibility of reviewing readers' reports and approving publication of
every book proposed by the publishing staff. That is what I meant by
"quality control," Rick, and it is indeed unique to university presses and
is a requirement of their membership in the AAUP.

Sandy Thatcher


At 2:48 AM -0400 7/4/12, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 15:46:32 +0000

All
university presses are mandated to have quality control procedures in place
for their operations. That is what makes them university presses.


Er, no. What makes them university presses is the fact that they're owned
and run by universities and call themselves university presses. If having
"quality control procedures in place for their operations" made a publisher
a university press, then by that definition most (if not all) trade
publishers would be university presses.

--
Rick Anderson
Acting Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah
[log in to unmask]