The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles? Actions in Washington this month highlight how far from settled the question is,…

Low sales, high numbers of books returned, operating subsidies threatened by state and university budget cuts: as the economy slumps, those are just some of the problems that confront academic publishers. Overall sales for July 1 through December 31 were down nearly 10 percent compared with the same period in 2007, according to a recent survey by…

This article reports that textbook sales are falling at many university presses, a trend that has accelerated in the past couple of months. That's the word from press directors anxious about the decline but unsure what's causing it or how to stop it. Not every press has been affected. Two of the biggest players, Oxford University Press and…

Did he or didn't he? The question is vexing Coleridge scholars. Did the author of "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" compose a blank-verse translation of Goethe's "Faust" that was published anonymously in London in 1821? Two prominent Romanticists, Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick, both Americans, believe they…

Annual reports aren't exactly beach reading, but for anyone interested in the current condition of scholarly communication, the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation--particularly the essay on "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel--is a page turner. The foundation's deep pockets and…

Publishing research is more critical than ever to a university's mission, but too many institutions fail to recognize and support it adequately, even as their presses struggle to find their footing in a fast-changing online world. That's the message driven home by a report called "University Publishing in a Digital Age," released by "Ithaka", a…

This article reports on reactions to the Association of American Publishers' new public-relations campaign, which has upset many university presses and research librarians, as well as open-access advocates. The effort, known as the "Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine," or Prism, is the latest tactic in a continuing…

A surprise request for proposals from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a forthcoming report on university publishing in the digital age were among topics discussed at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The offer from the Mellon Foundation concerns support for collaborative, monograph-centered projects in…

University presses have complained for years that tenure committees unfairly expect their editors to be arbiters of what counts as tenure-worthy work. At the same time, the presses have been caught in a business-side squeeze between dwindling sales (and shrinking subsidies) and the ever-greater pressure on scholars to publish. In this article, the…