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=869c5421560248be8a97e2271ce565ef&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