The Association of University Presses was pleased to award a number of grants to support attendance at its 2024 Annual Meeting in Montréal, Quebec. The Equity, Justice, Inclusion, and Belonging (EJIB) Grant, covering registration fees as well as up to $1,000 in travel expenses, were awarded to five attendees who each identify as a member of an underrepresented group within the Association.

Grant recipients Cabrini Cruz, Kathie Jiang, Jess Merrill, Carah Naseem, and Melissa Yamaguchi offered the following brief descriptions of their experiences.

Cabrini Cruz, Textbook Project Lead & Managing Editor, University of Guam Press

The Association of University Presses Annual Meeting was an enriching experience for my colleagues and me. It provided opportunities to connect with numerous publishing professionals and vendors.

Key highlights included discussing our collaboration with Guam Department of Education to develop place-based social studies textbooks for elementary students. I networked with professionals from Brown, Hawaii, Florida, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and more, exchanging insights about editing processes and timelines. I also attended a productive lunch meeting with managing editors.

The central topic of the meeting was AI and its effects on the publishing industry. A standout session I participated in was titled “AI and Publishing: What’s Keeping Us Up at Night?”. While the discussion was dominated by questions of legality and intellectual property, I particularly appreciated the focus on protecting Indigenous knowledge. Since digitalization can make information vulnerable to AI, the panelists emphasized a particular need to safeguard Indigenous knowledge, which is often passed down through traditional avenues rather than published. They also discussed following the example of Indigenous knowledge distribution to protect intellectual property in the future.

Lastly, I also won a contest that required participants to visit all the vendors at the meeting. I won a $100 Barnes and Nobles gift card!

I will use the knowledge and insights gained from the Annual Meeting to enhance my work as a project manager in developing textbooks for Guam. The connections made and best practices learned will directly inform our processes and collaborations, ensuring we produce high-quality, relevant educational materials. I look forward to future AUPresses learning and sharing opportunities.

Kathie Jiang, Marketing & Client Management Assistant, University of Pennsylvania Press

AUPresses Annual Meeting 2024 in Montréal was a tremendous experience for me as an early career professional, as I only started working fulltime at a small press in the end of 2022. It was very gratifying to naturally meet colleagues there, including both early-career folks whom I had only connected with via email as well as folks who are more advanced in their careers that I recognized from AUPresses listservs.

I am very grateful that a former Penn Press colleague, Alex Gupta, invited me to participate in the “Conferences 101: How to Survive (and Thrive) at Your Next Academic Conference” panel and to be a part of a larger discussion about the future of conferences. Preparing and giving my remarks gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own professional trajectory and how much I had learned. I was glad to find similarities in my fellow speakers’ experiences, to gain confidence in publicly speaking about my work, and to be part of a collaborative that aims to produce a resource document for first-time conference goers in publishing.

I wish that AUPresses could have added more marketing sessions or distributed them differently, especially when my own panel took place at the same time as my colleague Gigi Lamm’s panel on “Swedish Death Cleaning Your Marketing Toolbox.” In timeslots when there wasn’t a marketing-related panel, I had the opportunity to learn more about acquisitions or journals, but I found the marketing sessions that I was able to attend (“Content Marketing in the Age of AI,” “Navigating Social Media Marketing in a Post-Twitter World,” “The Same but Different: Book Sales and Marketing in the United States and Canada”) were all highly informative and will help me grow my skillset in this rapidly changing field. I would have loved to attend more marketing sessions had they not been competing for attention in the same timeslots.

I also had the special opportunity to reconnect with my former supervisors at the Getty Research Institute, where I got my start in academic publishing through a summer internship in college. It was in this internship that I learned about book production (transmittal preparation, image rights, copyediting), journals editing, and how a publishing team works together to produce quality scholarly publications, which inspired me to take the job at Penn Press.

I’m grateful to AUPresses for the EJIB grant. Montréal is a wonderful city and I really enjoyed it as a place to connect with so many colleagues and gain specific insights into the American, Canadian, and world publishing landscape. Attending the Annual Meeting also made me seriously reflect on the state of diversity and equity in scholarly publishing; seeing a small sample of the demographics of the field through the conference attendees made me realize how much farther we have to go in making this a more equitable industry.

Jess Merrill, Textbook Lead Designer & Production Manager, University of Guam Press

There was no shortage of excitement and energy at this year’s AUPresses 2024 Annual Meeting! As a first-time attendee, I was grateful for the resources provided to navigate the overall program and organize my time wisely throughout each day. I appreciated the sessions and follow-up discussions that explored the future of AI in publishing, and the sessions that expanded on ways to make publishing more accessible online and offline. These presentations revealed the strategies that different presses use to tackle tech growth and implement catalog improvements, which was very helpful to get a glimpse into the range of solutions across institutions. I also found value in attending sessions, joining casual chats, or speaking with vendors that are outside of my job’s scope, allowing this opportunity to carry notes back to my colleagues that were not in attendance and help them in their roles.

This AUPresses Annual Meeting was a great way to feel a sense of connection to so many incredible people with similar interests and goals towards improving and expanding university press content. I feel an immense amount of gratitude for the opportunity to learn and share in a face-to-face setting, and I look forward to participating and attending future meetings.

Carah Naseem, Acquisitions Editor, Rutgers University Press

I had an amazing time at my first in-person AUPresses Annual Meeting. Many thanks to AUPresses for selecting me to attend on an EJIB grant. While at the conference, I presented on my first panel on DEI and retention for mid- to late-career staff. It was a fantastic experience to meet other folks in university presses grappling with questions on racism, inclusion, retention, and hiring practices, and to build what I hope will be lasting relationships with my co-panelists. I was able to meet with other acquisitions editors, most valuably those who are in similar places in their career trajectories, which made me feel part of a cohort. I was happy to connect with members of the Professional Development Committee, as I attended a good number of panels on the subject. I was also grateful for the “Diversifying the List/Decolonizing the Catalogue” discussion that took place after hours with the Library Relations Committee on Wednesday evening. All in all, I felt inspired to volunteer for EJIB Committee service next year, to keep building conversations and support across my cohort of young acquisitions editors, and to keep thinking about the ways in which university publishing can contribute to more just world.

Melissa Yamaguchi, Journals Production Editor, University of Hawaii Press

First, I would like to thank the AUPresses for selecting me to receive one of the EJIB Grants to attend this year’s Annual Meeting. I found it to be a very collaborative convention, learned a ton in the sessions, and enjoyed myself in Montreal. Below are takeaways from several of the sessions I attended:

• The opening AI plenary was interesting to me, as I work with a lot of science-based journals editors who are extremely concerned about it. I appreciated hearing about AI benefits that I can report to these editors, such AI tagging, comparing similarity in studies, in models, and in pattern-making for discovery-based learning.

• “Integrating Accessibility into Book and Journal Publishing Workflows”: Seeing the perspective of a reader who can’t easily use the mouse or keyboard prompted me to check our press website, especially for our older journals and books that predate accessibility mandates, to see whether we offer accessible alternatives. Some workflows that support greater accessibility are already in place at my press, but our journal procedures need more attention.

• The lunch discussion on sustainability was eye opening, focusing on the idea that sustainable measures can be efficiency-based and not solely business-model-based. I do agree that the pandemic forced us to change habits in productive ways such as reducing waste, reducing travel, increasing video conferences, etc. This is an interesting topic for someone who lives on an island where recycling is encouraged but sometimes creates more waste (shipping recyclables actually causes more pollution). After lunch I was able to meet with current vendors and investigate new ones.

• The “Subscribe to Open” (S2O) session was a great listen since many of my editors and authors want to know how to best use open access. One of our journals is currently in S2O, and I am excited to see the new viewership.

• The “Practice What You Publish” panel focused on acquisitions, which isn’t my area, but I found it to be quite relevant, particularly given my press’s work with Native voices addressing the Mauna Kea Thirty Meter Telescope. The proposed telescope is controversial because its placement would require other older telescopes in the area to be torn down and because the site is sacred as well as home to endangered species. As a university press, we’re also mindful of our university’s investment in these kinds of projects through the astronomy department (which is also our neighbor). Maintaining the integrity of all the voices we speak for, especially in the face of prevalent misinformation, is incredibly important. This can be tricky, but if we understand the nature of the controversy, then we can be intentionally meaningful. Sometimes we will need to publish two sides of a story. Sometimes we have to talk frankly with our editors and authors in order to be accountable.

• “New Formats, New Topics, New Authors, New Audiences: Diversifying Journals Content”: Panelists shared their experiences and challenges of expanding their journals’ impact through video abstracts, podcasts, webinars, blogs, and interactive social media. This was a meaningful panel to me because I am working on marketing formats and using traditional email blasts and blog posts to promote our journals. 

• “The Journal Ecosystem: Small Society Publishers”: One presenter talked about using a council to reimagine and bring ideas to the table (ex: revamp cover designs). Another small society uses copyeditors with content knowledge which a UP might lack. I was fascinated to hear the different ways people handle peer reviews and book reviews as well as subscription models—some societies don’t include subscriptions as a membership benefit. I also appreciated the suggestion that we declare non-negotiable items when engaging a new vendor account or renewing any contract.