Earlier today, the Association of American University Presses issued a report entitled Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses. More than a year in the making, and an excellent example of the kinds of cooperation among presses long fostered by the AAUP, it offers an in-depth look at a wide variety of experiments in various stages of implementation by a broad number of member presses.  It also provides a succinct overview of why academic publishers (still) matter in the academy, and according to at least one early reviewer, “It would be irresponsible for any university administrator with oversight of a press to fail to read this.” (Joe Esposito writing for the Scholarly Kitchen).

The release of the report is sure to generate much discussion. It also provides a springboard for the AAUP’s Digital Publishing Committee (Laura Cerruti, California, Chair; Emily Arkin, Harvard; Sharon Casteel, Texas; Krista Coulson, Wisconsin; Jake Furbush, MIT, Dennis Lloyd, Florida; Fred Nachbaur, Fordham, Patti O’Shea, Chicago; and Tony Sanfilippo, Penn State) to roll out the next phase of its communications plan for the AAUP membership.

For the past few months, we’ve been analyzing the results of last year’s electronic survey, and polling chairs of other AAUP committees to identify the issues most in the minds of AAUP members. For the next several months, we’ll host a series of guest blogs focused on broadly defined topics. For March, the theme is “New Business Models.”

Take some time (if you haven’t already) to read the report. Let us know if you want to learn more about any of these new models, and we’ll see if we can commission a posting from someone involved in the project. Several guests have already agreed to create short, informal blog posts about their experiments, and these will appear over the next few days. Feel free to respond with comments or questions, and at the end of the month we’ll endeavor to wrap things up with a Q&A posting.

Thanks for reading, and more soon!

Dennis Lloyd
University Press of Florida