From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2017 09:53:44 -0500

Here is the link: http://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/The-Future-of-
the-University/118?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=869c542
1560248be8a97e2271ce565ef&elq=c05818a1a6bf42518cb8f4a35f03bb6b
&elqaid=14188&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5954

The very first sentence starts:  "People are convinced there is a crisis in
university press publishing . . . ."

This "crisis" has long been with us. In 1997 at a conference co-sponsored
by the AAUP, ARL, and ACLS I gave a talk titled  "Thinking Systematically
about the Crisis in Scholarly Communication" for which i provided this
background:

But first it may be useful to offer some historical perspective on this
so-called crisis. It has, in fact, been with us for so long now that maybe
"crisis" is really a misnomer--"chronic illness" may be a more accurate
description. The librarians in this audience will be familiar with a now
classic NSF-funded study by Bernard Fry and Herbert White published in 1975
that found, for the period 1969-1973, that the ratio of book to journal
expenditures in the largest academic libraries had dropped over that
five-year period from better than 2 to 1 to 1.16 to 1 (Fry/White 1975: 61),
with every expectation that this trend would only get worse--as, indeed, it
has. (Recent* ARL statistics* show the decline in monograph purchases since
1986 among these libraries to have been nearly 25%.) Fry and White's
prognosis for university presses was particularly gloomy: their situation,
they said, "can be described, without exaggeration, as disastrous. Already
heavily encumbered by operating deficits..., university presses appear...to
be sliding even more rapidly toward financial imbalance" (Fry/White 1975:
11).

This precarious situation was viewed with alarm by university presses
themselves at this time. A series of articles appeared in the journal
Scholarly Publishing in April 1972, July 1973, and April 1974 based on
successive surveys of presses covering the years 1970-1974. The first
article, entitled "The Impending Crisis in University Publishing," "clearly
indicated that presses were in the midst of a period of extraordinary
financial stress, which posed a serious threat to the continuing survival
of many of them" (Becker 1974: 195). The next two articles bore the titles
"The Crisis--One Year Later" and "The Crisis--Is It Over?" The somewhat
encouraging conclusion of the last article in this series was that, "except
for the smaller ones, presses for the most part have managed to survive
their financial difficulties quite well by making a host of adjustments,
including radically increased book prices, substantially lower discounts,
economies achieved in book production costs, slashing staffs, publishing
more books with sales potential and fewer which cannot pay their own way,
special inventory sales, and so forth." But, the author wondered, how much
more can such methods be used without becoming at some point
self-defeating. Ominously and--as we can now see with the wisdom of
hindsight--presciently, he ended by pointing to "the increasing danger that
presses will turn more and more to publishing books on the basis of
saleability rather than scholarly merit." And, while noting the temporary
mitigating effects that a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to
presses for publishing books in the humanities might have, he asked: "But
what then?" (Becker 1974: 202)

As Jim said, "There must be some smart people doing some good work" because
we still have a lot of university presses continuing to function and
performing their service for academe and the public good.

Sandy Thatcher

From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2017 09:10:29 -0700

The Chronicle of Higher Education today has results of an extensive survey
of University Press leaders and others on the vexed future of that
community.  The following link takes you to the landing page for the
feature, but that comprises only a list of links to sub-topics, most of
which are paywalled.  Worth an exploration if you have access.  Their
introduction:  "We asked publishers, press directors, editors, scholars,
and other insiders for their views on the state and future of academic
publishing. Of the people we contacted, including the heads of nearly every
one of the Association of American University Presses' 143 members, 46 sent
back responses to our questions. We got back a surprisingly wide range of
views - and good ideas on how university presses are preparing for an
uncertain future.

At the end of a quarter century of attending meetings and reading articles
discussing the crisis in University Press publishing, I observe that for
there to be still 143 players standing in that space suggests that
*something* is working.  There must be some smart people doing some good
work.

Jim O'Donnell

ASU