This article presents an interview with Christie Henry. She joined Princeton University Press as Director in 2017, from the University of Chicago Press where she was editorial director for sciences, social sciences, and reference publishing. She is a long-term leader in the world of university publishing, and has held a number of community roles,…

In this article, the authors report since the early 1980s, the profession has seen plenty of changes in the arena of digital scholarly publishing: during this time, while the specific challenges have seldom remained the same, the presence and the pressures of rapid technological change endure. In fact, as an editorial team that has, in part,…

The existence of a ubiquitous and cheap worldwide communications network that increasingly makes documents easily and freely available will require a transformation of academic library collecting practice. It will be driven by a number of specific developments including: the digitization of content; the development of print repositories; the…

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…

The modern world's understanding of American university press has long been shaped by university-press books. American university-press books are good international advertisements for the universities whose logos grace their spines. The growth of transnational scholarship and the expansion of digital communications networks are converging in ways…

While university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how books are published--the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles--discussion of "what" is published seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books are…

A 2007 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) survey indicates that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services: 65 percent of 80 responding ARL member libraries currently deliver or are in processing of planning these services. Established journal titles dominate this emerging publishing sector and are the main drivers of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

In this interview Charles Henry, publisher of the Rice University Press (RUP), discusses RUP's rebirth as a fully digital university press. Henry addresses the circumstances that led to this decision, and he further outlines the RUP business model whereby the press will publish its own titles--both digitally and in print-on-demand--while…

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…