Susan Ferrence, Director of Publications at INSTAP Academic Press, reports on visiting the University of Michigan Press

INSTAP Academic Press was established in 2001 to help publish projects dealing specifically with the subject of Aegean prehistory. It is part of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), which was established as a nonprofit organization in the United States in 1982, and it supports projects relevant to the history of the Aegean world from the Paleolithic to the 8th century B.C. The Press is a boutique, scholarly, award-winning, nonprofit publisher specializing in high-quality volumes of primary source material from archaeological excavations as well as individual studies dealing with material from the prehistoric periods. The books that we publish are dense, lengthy, and complex with a lot of data, catalogs, tables, drawings, maps, photos, and foreign language references. We are a very small press, averaging four titles each year, with over 80 titles in print and five employees. I am an archaeologist and art historian, and have directed the press since 2012.

We do not have the institutional support of a college or university, so we are especially grateful for the services, support, and advice that AUPresses provides to its members including this Directors Residency grant.

I chose the University of Michigan Press (UMP) to host my Directors Residency because I have known Charles Watkinson for many years—ever since he was the director of publications of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—and also because his large organization at Michigan offers much that our tiny operation can learn. I appreciate his intimate, and increasingly rare, knowledge of the work that goes into producing complex archaeological volumes. Also, he and I had spoken at the Directors’ Summit in October 2023 about mutual projects regarding archaeology and AI.

I am also very interested in Michigan’s process of producing the recent two-volume open-access set of excavation reports by Michael Galaty and colleagues. He is a professor and a curator in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA), and his two-volume set was produced by UMMAA Press. In meeting and comparing workflows with their small staff of Elizabeth Noll (editor) and Bruce Worden (graphic artist), it became clear that their process is much the same as ours.

A very interesting meeting with Joanna Thielen and Peter Cerda, digital archive specialists for Deep Blue at University of Michigan, focused on the archaeological archive of Galaty’s PASH research and the procedures for deposition of files into the open access (OA) digital archive. It became clear that Galaty had planned from the very beginning, and sought grant funding support, to make all of his data publicly available online. Consequently, he and his team were extremely systematic and thorough with their data-entry and file-naming processes throughout the years of excavation and research that lead to publication. The DOI for the PASH project in the Deep Blue archive is provided in the front matter of the online book, thus linking the final published report to all the supporting materials.

When I met with Ellen Bauerle, UMP acquiring editor for classical and medieval studies, including its Old World archaeology books, we compared and contrasted workflows, discussed using freelancers, and commiserated about the complex nature of publishing archaeological reports.

UMP Editorial Director Sara Jo Cohen, and I discussed publishing media-heavy books and requirements of manuscript submission, including Michigan’s Final Manuscript Submission Log (FMSL). We will certainly adapt some of Michigan’s instructions, requirements, and forms for INSTAP authors. I also had the opportunity to attend UMP’s Operations Group meeting focused on the press’s two-year experiment with Pagemajik, a third-party software designed to streamline transmittal of manuscripts from acquisitions to copyediting.

Jamie Jones, UMP director of sales, marketing, and outreach, gave much-needed advice about managing social media accounts and scheduling posts. She was very helpful in our discussion of the current social media landscape, and she recommended leveraging Asana (a project management app that we already use to manage our manuscript workflow remotely) to collate content and schedule social media posts.

I also learned a great deal about all that Michigan Publishing Services (MPS) encompasses, including their online platform, Fulcrum, and how it supports OA volumes in addition to restricted ebooks. In my meeting with Jeremy Morse, UMP director of publishing technology and head of research data services, he explained the history and implementation of the Fulcrum book platform and how it differs from others; significantly, its interface facilitates interaction with the book as a whole, not at the chapter level as other platforms do.

I was very interested to learn from MPS director Jason Colman that they use Newgen for copyediting and page layout, although I doubt it could be used for the type of books that INSTAP publishes. Jason and I looked at the Fulcrum digital collection of British Archaeological Reports and, over the course of several Fulcrum staff meetings, I was introduced to analytics services vendors, Scholarly iQ and LibLynx; heard doctoral intern Caroline Nemechek present very interesting survey data regarding the online user experience of OA books; and learned more about ebook sales to libraries from  Kelsey Mrjoian, MPS library relations manager. It was extremely interesting to learn about the ACLS and Lever Press collections on Fulcrum, the products of smaller societies and colleges that have come together as consortia to collaborate on publications.

User experience and accessibility specialist Jon McGlone and I had a wide-ranging conversation about EPUB vs. PDF accessibility and the European directive that will become law in 2025. He deals primarily with EPUB file accessibility, but in my opinion EPUB is not yet capable of accommodating the complexities of archaeological monographs. All of INSTAP’s ebooks are PDFs, and we are constantly learning new accessibility workflows and have recently purchased two new software apps, MadeToTag and AxesPDF, to aid in making the PDF files as accessible as possible. Jon reminded me about the services offered by Benetech to verify accessibility. We also discussed the fully digitally interactive excavation report about the Gabii (Roman) cemetery hosted by Fulcrum. This was a great segue into a later meeting with Nic Terrenato, who directs the Gabii Project and the Kelsey Museum of Classical Archaeology. We discussed his extensive experience in planning, funding, and implementing the immersive digital interactive format of his unique type of excavation report.

The University of Michigan Library and Press are members of the Crossref Books Interest Group, and I joined their spring online meeting, which focused on identifiers involving an international group of publishers. Crossref was unknown to me before the meeting even though I use DOI references all the time in my own research and JSTOR assigns DOIs to the INSTAP volumes on its platform. It was illuminating to learn about Crossref’s role in issuing and managing DOIs, and also to learn about Lyrasis and its hosting services. Charles and I also examined the pricing structure of INSTAP books on the OASIS system of the University of Michigan Libraries, which provided helpful information from a librarian’s perspective that I’ve been able to convey to the distributor which manages our physical and ebook sales and distribution.

And last but certainly not least, I was able to meet in person with our JSTOR Books Platform representative, Cristina Mezuk, and we discussed the automatic archiving of all INSTAP book PDFs in Portico (part of Ithaka).

I learned a great deal in the various meetings that Charles set up for me. I was introduced to new organizations, experts, software, and platforms. The three working days I spent in Ann Arbor were especially useful in broadening the horizon of my publishing landscape, and there are certain aspects of Michigan’s processes that we will look to implement into our workflow. Other ideas from my trip to Michigan will inform future developments for INSTAP Academic Press. I am especially grateful to Charles for generously sharing his time, knowledge, and advice with me.