Building Professional Support Networks across Publishing Careers

Annual Meetings, Professional Development

By Christian Pizarro Winting and Bethany Wasik

Christian Pizarro Winting is Associate Editor at Columbia University Press, acquiring titles in economics, anthropology, and African-American studies. He is a member of the AUPresses Professional Development Committee.

Bethany Wasik is Acquisitions Editor at Cornell University Press, acquiring titles in archaeology, classics, European history, and military history. She currently serves as co-chair of the AUPresses Professional Development Committee.

At the 2022 AUPresses Annual Meeting, the Association’s Professional Development Committee (PDC) hosted a collaboration lab that invited members of the Association to discuss challenges, strategies, and opportunities in building professional networks. The aim of this session was to generate resources for those new to the profession, staff at smaller publishers, and all colleagues looking to develop tools and skills to build professional networks and solve common problems across the industry. Below, we detail the results of the thoughtful and constructive conversations that took place.

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Travel Grant Recipients Reflect on AUPresses 2022 Annual Meeting, Part 3

Annual Meetings

Observations from Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Grant Recipients

The Association of University Presses was pleased to award a number of grants to support attendance at its Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, this summer. Equity, Justice, and Inclusion (EJI) Grants, covering meeting registration fees as well as up to $1,000 in travel expenses, were awarded to seven attendees who each identify as a member of an underrepresented group within the Association.

Grant recipients Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, Cindy Lim, Wren Morgan Myers, and Khelee Williams offered the following brief descriptions of their experiences.

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Travel Grant Recipients Reflect on AUPresses 2022 Annual Meeting, Part 2

Annual Meetings

Observations from Next Step Grant Recipients

The Association of University Presses was pleased to award a number of grants to support attendance at its Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, this summer. Generously funded by Ingram Content Group and covering full meeting registration fees, Next Step Grants were awarded to four mid-career individuals attending their first in-person Annual Meeting.

Grant recipients Laura Ansley, Daniel Bean, Traci Cothran, and Holly Mitchell offered the following brief descriptions of their experiences.

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Travel Grant Recipients Reflect on AUPresses 2022 Annual Meeting, Part 1

Annual Meetings

Observations from Early Career Grant Recipients

The Association of University Presses was pleased to award a number of grants to support attendance at its Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, this summer. Generously funded by Ingram Content Group, and covering meeting registration fees as well as up to $1,000 in travel expenses, Early Career Grants were awarded to five first-time meeting attendees with more than six months but less than three years of experience in scholarly publishing.

Grant recipients Jessica Abraham, Laura Fish, Candice Lawrence, and Lily Stephens offered the following brief descriptions of their experiences.

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Selected Readings on Race and Publishing

Annual Meetings, ,

from Anjali Vats

Anjali Vats presented the closing plenary, “Publishing for Racial Justice: A Meditation on Copyright Equity in Academic Publishing,” at the AUPresses 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Her thesis: “Copyright law is a central modality through which inequity persists in the publishing industry specifically and academia generally due to 1) opaque contracts negotiated with large publishing firms, 2) regulated rights of distribution and circulation, with restrictive notions of copyright infringement and fair use, and 3) long periods of copyright protection that is historically and empirically structured in favor of white cishet males.” She challenged scholarly publishers to consider how these inequities operate in university press and academic journal settings as well as to find approaches to dismantle oppressive copyright practices.

Below she suggests resources on race and publishing for further reading/viewing.

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Sustaining and Reimagining the Monograph

Digital Formats, New Business Models, Open Access, Pilot Projects

By Lisa Bayer

Lisa Bayer is AUPresses President (2021-2022) and the director of the University of Georgia Press. This article is based on her remarks to the National Information Standards Organization’s 2021 Humanities Roundtable, “The Monograph in an Evolving Humanities Ecosystem.”

During a podcast interview last year Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia and Zillow, was asked how he’d pitched the idea of Expedia to Bill Gates back in 1996. He replied, “We were encouraged to swing big.” It’s an apt metaphor for university press publishing in general too, particularly for this community’s collaborative work, with each other and with the entire scholarly ecosystem, to sustain and reimagine monographs.

University presses individually and as a team—in the form of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses)—are in league with humanities scholars and a variety of other individual and institutional partners around the world. Long-form scholarship, otherwise known as the monograph, is the game ball or the diamond, depending on your perspective. A 2019 survey of some 5,000 scholars by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press found that “the monograph remains a vital part of the scholarly ecosystem . . .  especially in the Humanities.” But monograph publishing has not ever been about the final product alone. Respondents said that the process of writing, of conducting research, of thinking it through, of creativity and intellectual freedom, allowed them to develop “interconnected, complex arguments” that became new knowledge through delivery in long-form texts. Survey respondents did feel, however, that “experimentation and evolution,” especially regarding access and discoverability, were necessary for monographs to remain relevant and useful—which is why this conversation continues, and continues to matter.

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