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…

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)…

In this article, I discuss how the space of the classroom is a contested object that is constituted by historical, cultural, political, social, psychological, and discursive practices (Lefebvre in The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1991). I then employ Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "assemblage" to characterize the ways in which…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the "skills" or "employability" agenda which has long been anathema to the Humanities disciplines need not be the threat it appears to represent. This paper aims to examine the concept of realistic work environments and their focus, not only the provision of hard and soft…

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…

This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way…

Midwestern gardeners are legendary for enduring and outwitting winter, with its heavy snowpack and recurring freezes and thaws. Most of them also reckon with a relatively short growing period. All of them find their horticultural plans complicated by hot, humid summers. In fact, the Midwest deals with four seasons dictating special considerations…

This research investigated the current copyright policies of 21 education journals published by academic societies, universities and university presses, and commercial publishers. For the sample I chose only journals with a copyright policy on the journal or publisher web site, and I then analyzed the content of the policies in order to answer…

America's university presses are situated within a network of over one hundred universities, learned societies, and scholarly associations. According to a pamphlet put out by the American Association of University Presses, these presses "make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty."…

Are university presses ready for their close-up? In a nod to Hollywood, a growing number of trade publishers are producing book trailers to promote new titles. But do video teasers have a role in university-press publishing? What about longer formats? Based on an entirely unscientific poll of publicists at 25 university presses, the answer appears…

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…

University presses are more likely to give voice to stories that might not otherwise be told, such as those involving minority perspectives. But opportunities are shrinking. As extensions of their parent schools, academic presses rarely reap profits, experts say. Many rely on school subsidies to survive. Factor in substantial budget cuts to…

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…

Despite arguments for the relative ease of learning common noun meanings, semantic development continues well past the early years of language acquisition even for names of concrete objects. We studied evolution of the use of common nouns during later lexical development. Children aged 5-14 years and adults named common household objects and their…