Tag Archives: scholarly publishing

University-Based Publishing Futures

Annual Meetings, General, University-Based Publishing Futures,

An Update

University-Based Publishing Futures (UBPF) is a multi-community coalition of professionals who work at university presses, library publishers, and other academy-affiliated programs that support the infrastructure of scholarly publishing. The group recently offered an update on its activities since its founding last year:

  • welcoming of 26 new signatories, including 11 AUPresses members,
  • reporting on initial work of its Knowledge Sharing and Advocacy Working Groups, as well as its ad-hoc signatories working group,
  • launching a UBPF Group Hub in Knowledge Commons, and
  • looking forward to a UBPF-themed day of joint programming to be held between the 2026 AUPresses Annual Meeting and the 2026 Library Publishing Forum in Seattle, Washington, in June.

AUPresses is proud to be a cofounder and supporter of this initiative, along with the Library Publishing Coalition. If your press, library, or organization is not yet a signatory, you can become one by filling out the Organizational Support Form.

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.

Continue reading Selected Readings on Race and Publishing →

The Long Civil Rights Movement: Reflections on The Online Pilot and Thoughts on Enhanced E-books

Digital Formats, Pilot Projects, , , , , , , ,

Check out the blog at “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” for Sylvia Miller’s reflections on their recently-ended online pilot.

In the first of two posts, she writes:

After 14 months, the Long Civil Rights Movement Project’s pilot online collection officially closed its test period on July 18, 2011.  You can still see it at https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/voice/works, although project staff will no longer grant premium access to the full text of the experimental site’s 87 titles (books, articles, papers, and reports) to those who register except by special request.  Registration will continue to give any user the ability to see open-access content and comment on it at the paragraph level.

The commenting feature was the focus of the experiment.  During the test period, the number of registered users grew beyond our expectations, finishing at 776.  The number of annotations contributed by users was also impressive, finishing at 607.

In addition to these valuable statistics, Miller shares other learnings from the pilot, including valuable information on contributor behaviors, use of archives in teaching, and enhanced e-books. In her second post, Miller links to a number of other projects also experimenting in the area of archives, enhanced e-books, and “portal books.”

Posted by Laura Cerruti, University of California Press