Mark Anderson, a professor of philosophy at Belmont University, publishes an account of Nietzsche's life and work. He remembered liking "Friedrich Nietzsche" (Overlook Press, 2005), by the late independent scholar Curtis Cate, so he started rereading that one. But then he had second thoughts. After all, "Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical…

Previous research has documented how political scientists evaluate and rank scholarly journals, but the evaluation and ranking of scholarly book publishers has drawn less attention. In this article, we use data from a survey of 603 American political scientists to generate a ranking of scholarly publishers in political science. We used open-ended…

When the news broke in the "New York Times" in August 2009 that Yale University Press had decided to remove twelve Danish cartoon images of the prophet Mohammed from "The Cartoons That Shook the World," a forthcoming book by Brandeis political scientist Jytte Klausen, the author felt that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)…

On April 15, 2008, a lawsuit was filed against Georgia State University by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage, supported by the American University Presses (AAP). The complaint asserted ""pervasive, flagrant, and ongoing" unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials...through its electronic course…

University presses have largely abdicated the job of substantive editing to outside readers, who write reports evaluating the quality of the work and offering both major and minor editing suggestions. Editors develop a cadre of readers they know they can trust, who will be fair, rigorous, and prompt with their reports. The author particularly…

On August 4, 2008, four leading associations serving research universities, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, convened a roundtable discussion engaging provosts, chief research…

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…

Robert N. Bellah turns 80 early next year, and Duke University Press is honoring him with "The Robert Bellah Reader," edited by Bellah, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Steven M. Tipton, a professor of sociology at Emory University. The book, just published, presents a selection of…

Much of the current North American academic crisis of publishing, tenure, and promotion is both the cause and the effect of this fetishization dominant in the humanities: that of the grand narrative of knowledge-production, respectably bound with a spine. Short works will get one only so far, no matter how many of them one produces, or how well.…

Several books published by university presses serve no purpose besides credentialing professors, but since the collapse of the US academic job market in the early 1970s, it is mandatory for professors to be published. However, it appears to be time, particularly for the younger academics, to abandon the genteel pose of being aloof from the sordid…

In the celebrity-driven, star-struck culture, university professors do not receive the attention or praise--not to mention the paychecks--of movie actors, pop music idols, super models, or sports stars. Although professors' egos may not be much smaller than those of celebrities, academia lacks the promotional infrastructure of professional sports…

Describes cooperation between the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) and University of North Texas Press, resulting in the publication of a collection of short stories and a book of poetry written by DCCCD faculty and staff. Provides information on sales, marketing and promotion, classroom use of the books, and opportunities for…

Copyright law supports a fundamental mission of colleges and universities to create and disseminate new knowledge and understanding through teaching, research, and scholarship in two basic ways: (1) by providing incentives for the creation of new works through the provision of proprietary rights to copyright owners, and (2) by providing…