The University Press Redux: Introduction

Arising from the University Press Redux Conference held in Liverpool in March 2016, which welcomed presses large, small, commercial, open access, library-based, UK, US, and European, and heard the views of authors, funders, students, librarians, and some of the most dynamic figures in university press publishing, the collection of articles that make up this special issue of Learned Publishing tells us two things we perhaps need never have doubted: first that there is a community of university-based publishers out there who continue to privilege the mission of scholarly dissemination in the face of an evolving and often challenging marketplace, and second that despite this common thread there is no such thing as a typical university press. Nevertheless, Ithaka’s Roger Schonfield has helpfully endeavoured to establish a taxonomy of university presses in a recent blog post www.sr.ithaka.org/blog/a-taxonomy-of-universitypresses-today/. For Schonfield, presses are best characterized as ‘global presses’ (Oxbridge), ‘traditional success stories’ (typically based at wealthy Ivy League institutions), ‘innovators’ (often helmed by directors drawn from commercial academic publishing, and are keen to evolve the industry), ‘integrated presses’ (those merged with libraries), ‘new entrants’ (self-styled disrupters, whose long-term viability is still unknown), and ‘the pressured middle’ (Schonfield’s term for the majority of US presses, subsidized but squeezed by diminished demand for the monograph and a reduction in funding). These categories are used to describe US presses specifically, and of course they are imperfect as any attempt to categorize such a diverse group must be. However, expanding consideration of the university press further to a global context and, with the caveat that this too requires a little generalization, some striking regional differences are apparent. All presses in the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia, among other countries, enjoy the good fortune of operating and publishing in English, the global lingua franca of scholarly communication since World War II. But, as Margo Bargheer outlines in her article, as recently as the 1920s, German was the most published language of scholarly communication. The dispersal, and in some cases elimination, of German scholars by the Nazis and national restructuring after WWII ended that domination, and now German university presses, like those working in other continental European languages, today find themselves operating in markets limited to a large extent by linguistic borders. Linguistically limited demand combined with the never-ending supply that comes from a tradition of doctoral thesis publication as sine qua non for academic status, has created a fertile ground for open access university presses in mainland Europe. New open access Anglophone presses will be enlightened by Bargheer’s summary of long-standing open access publication by university presses. The United Kingdom is the birthplace of the university press, with the venerable Cambridge University Press, established in 1534, here represented by Mandy Hill. Longevity alone does not account for the enduring market muscle of Cambridge University Press and its fellow ‘global press’ at Oxford. Both have benefited from a host of other factors including the high status of their host institutions, the historical and geographical benefits of the former British Empire and its aftermath, a diversification of publishing through both shrewd editorial judgement and the luck of being a prominent publisher at a key moment of knowledge or product evolution (e.g. The Philological Society’s endeavours that formed the Oxford English Dictionary and ensuing Oxford reference list). The UK does not have the widespread tradition of major philanthropy in higher education that is more common in the USA and the majority of its established presses operate without significant subsidy. To square this circle, UK university presses enjoy the geographical advantage of residence in a small country with a