The University Press as a Publishing Model
What University Presses Are and How They Operate
Oct 24, 2009
University presses make up an important part of the publishing landscape, being academic and non-profit institutions at the same time. How they define themselves and their publishing goals are very different from purely commercial publishing.
What Is a University Press? – A Definition
When looking for a good definition of what a university press is and what distinguishes it from other publishing houses, a quote by Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, is useful. He said during the establishment of the university press in 1878 that “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.”
Publishing scholarly knowledge leads to the niche that university presses fulfill until the present day: Scholarly works are often cost-intensive, yet small-market projects that any commercial publisher would reject because of a lack of financial viability. University presses, as non-profit enterprises subsidized by the university and scholarly grants, however, can focus on the publication and dissemination of new academic knowledge.
University Press Publishing
A university press is a non-profit publishing house affiliated with a university that is dedicated to publishing scholarly works. University presses are not bound to publishing authors affiliated with the university; in fact, a university press is more likely to develop a specialization in a certain discipline or field. Also, no university press can afford to be unprofitable, therefore most have developed their own strategies to be profitable or at least break even.
Here’s a look at the kind of books a university press will publish:
- scholarly monographs as a result of scholarly inquiry
- academic journals with peer-reviewed articles but also dissertations in article form
- textbooks of assigned reading for undergraduate and graduate classes
- reference works
- trade books specific to a certain region, for example about regional history, culture, flora, fauna, cuisine
- books by prominent local authors
As Sheldon Meyer, Senior Vice President of Oxford University Press, and L.E. Phillabaum, Director of Louisiana University Press, rightly said in their 1980 essay “What Is A University Press?”: “Today university press publishing is a test of editorial wisdom, sound management, and financial acumen. Such publishers must maintain high standards of scholarship and book production while managing their presses with financial stringency and imaginative planning.”
A Brief History of University Presses
The history of university presses is intertwined with the history of moveable type and the printing of the first bibles in 1455 in Germany. Oxford and Cambridge University Press are the oldest and largest university presses. The former published a commentary on the Apostle’s Creed already in 1478 and the latter followed suite and opened its own press in 1521.
Cornell University was the first university on the other side of the Atlantic – in 1869, it combined a printing plant with its journalism program and published books but was shut down in 1884 and re-opened in 1930. The oldest, continuously operating university press in the United States is Johns Hopkins University Press, established in 1878, only two years after the university.
The greatest boom of scholarly publishing took place in the 1930s and ‘40s when many university presses were founded worldwide. Like their parent universities, the university presses could be small, publishing just a handful of titles or year, or large with hundreds of new titles a year; public or private and operating on tiny budgets or huge ones. It is this heterogeneity that shapes the diverse university press landscape even today.
When looking at a university press as a publishing model, the most important characteristic to keep in mind is that it publishes the results of university teaching and post-doctoral research and has made the dissemination of these academic results its goal, usually on a non-profit basis. Therefore, university presses extend their university’s mission of serving the public good through education by disseminating academic results.
Sources:
- Givler, Peter. “University Press Publishing in the United States.” In: Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Richard E. Abel and Lyman W. Newman. Wiley, 2002.
- Meyer, Sheldon & Phillabaum, L.E. “What Is a University Press?” In: Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 11, 218 (April 1980, revised 1994).
Readers interested in this article may also enjoy related articles about the Association of American University Presses, University Press Publishing Facts and How Sputnik Helped Academic Publishing.
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