Economics for Life

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase the latest book published by our imprint, North Broad Press.

North Broad Press, the joint Temple University Libraries and Press imprint, has published its fourth open textbook. Economics for Life: Real-World Financial Literacy, by Dr. Donald T. Wargo, is now available open access on the Press’s Manifold platform.

Wargo, Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University, has for several years taught an undergraduate course on financial literacy as part of Temple’s general education program. In the process of planning for and teaching his course, Wargo realized that not only did his students lack an understanding of financial decision making—including credit card use, making large purchases such as a car or home, and retirement planning. Opportunities for guidance on these major decisions were limited.

Wargo found that the available textbooks on the subject lacked the breadth and depth he believed was necessary to prepare students for the numerous decisions they would be facing, This, coupled with the high cost of the commercial textbook he had been using, led him to submit a proposal for an original open access textbook to North Broad Press. As he noted in his proposal, “Economics for Life: Real-World Financial Literacy is designed to help soon-to-be college graduates emerge into the start of their ‘real lives’ with better comprehension of how to analyze the financial decisions that they will soon have to make.”

With chapters on creating and living within a budget, evaluating and managing debt, and the fundamentals of investing, Economics for Life’s approachable style and accessible content make it an ideal book for anyone looking for practical guidance. Readers will learn how to use financial data to make informed personal finance decisions. The book’s Manifold site also includes a supplemental resource—an article by Wargo on the explanation and impact of the “pandemic recession,” defined as mid-February to mid-April 2020.

About the author

Dr. Donald T. Wargo is an Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University. His specializations are in Real Estate, Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics. Prior to his teaching career, he held executive positions in several large real estate companies in the Philadelphia area, including Vice President of Finance and President. For fifteen of those years, he ran his own development company, Wargo Properties, Inc.

About North Broad Press

North Broad Press publishes peer-reviewed open textbooks by Temple faculty and staff. It operates under the following core principles:

• We believe that the Libraries and the Press are critical resources for publishing expertise on campus.
• We believe that the unfettered flow of ideas, scholarship and knowledge is necessary to support learning, clinical practice, and research, and to stimulate creativity and the intellectual enterprise.
• We support Temple faculty, students, and staff by making their work available to audiences around the world via open access publishing.
• We believe that the scholarly ecosystem works best when creators retain their copyrights.
• We believe in experimentation and innovation in academic publishing.
• We work to decrease the cost of higher education and improve learning outcomes for students by publishing high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources.
• We believe in the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and promote these values through our publications.
• We commit to making our publications accessible to all who need to use them.
• We believe place matters. Our publications reflect Temple University and the North Philadelphia community of which we are a part.

Celebrating National Library Week

This week, in North Philly Notes, in honor of National Library Week, we highlight Temple University Press’ Open Access books, journals, and collaborations

Labor Studies and Work From its start, Temple University Press has been known for publishing significant titles in labor studies. Given this long history, many of these titles have gone out of print. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Press, in collaboration with Temple University Libraries, reissued 32 outstanding labor studies books in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats and made them freely available online. Chosen by an advisory board of scholars, labor studies experts, publishers, and librarians, each book contains a new foreword by a prominent scholar, reflecting on the content and placing it in historical context.

The grant enabled us to reissue the eight-volume The Black Worker series.

Knowledge Unlatched makes scholarly content freely available to everyone and contributes to the further development of the Open Access infrastructure. KU’s online marketplace provides libraries and institutions worldwide with a central place to support OA collections and models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiative.

Read an interview with Press author Jennifer Fredette, whose book, Constructing Muslims in France was one of the first KU titles. 

One of the recent Press titles in the Knowledge Unlatched program is Islam, Justice, and Democracy, by Sabri Ciftci.

We publish the open access journal, Commonwealth: A Journal of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, on behalf of the Pennsylvania Political Science Association. In 2021 Commonwealth published a special issue on women in Pennsylvania politics.

University Press Week Blog Tour: Innovate/Collaborate

University Press Week is November 8-12. The UP Blog Tour will feature entries all week long that celebrate this year’s theme, “Keep UP.” This year marks the 10th anniversary of UP Week, and the university press community will celebrate how university presses have evolved over the past decade.  

Honoring today’s theme, Innovate/Collaborate, we post about Temple University Press’ imprint, North Broad Press, a University Press, Libraries, and Faculty Collaboration for Open Textbooks.

For well over a decade, Temple University Press has been reporting to Temple University Libraries, and in 2018 we partnered to launch the collaborative imprint North Broad Press. 

North Broad Press (NBP) publishes open-access works of scholarship, both new and reissued, from the Temple University community. Our current focus is on open textbooks. NBP supports Temple faculty in the creation of a textbook specifically tailored to their course that is free for all students. NBP titles decrease the cost of higher education and improve learning outcomes for students. All books are peer reviewed and professionally produced with print-on-demand copies available at cost.

An important part of the Press’s mission is to educate, and with NBP we are shaping the approach to teaching and learning at Temple through the creation of custom textbooks. Authors write, organize, and present content in a way that aligns with teaching methods they know to be successful. In addition, we hope NBP titles will be used in courses beyond Temple, and peer reviewers are asked to consider this as they assess the projects.

NBP is part of the Libraries’ Center for Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing.  Its creation supports the Libraries and Press in achieving and advancing a strategic action named in the current strategic plan: “Explore new opportunities in publishing and scholarly communication: The Libraries will engage in deep collaboration with Temple University Press, with Temple faculty, and with other organizations and academic institutions to identify and adopt new approaches for sharing scholarly products, for exploring sustainable economic models for university publishing, and for connecting local publishing initiatives with Temple’s faculty.”

NBP’s work is based on the following core principles:

• We believe that the Libraries and the Press are critical resources for publishing expertise on campus.
• We believe that the unfettered flow of ideas, scholarship and knowledge is necessary to support learning, clinical practice, and research, and to stimulate creativity and the intellectual enterprise.
• We support Temple faculty, students, and staff by making their work available to audiences around the world via open access publishing.
• We believe that the scholarly ecosystem works best when creators retain their copyrights.
• We believe in experimentation and innovation in academic publishing.
• We work to decrease the cost of higher education and improve learning outcomes for students by publishing high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources.
• We believe in the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and promote these values through our publications.
• We commit to making our publications accessible to all who need to use them.
• We believe place matters. Our publications reflect Temple University and the North Philadelphia community of which we are a part.

NBP has filled a previously unaddressed need. We issued annual calls for proposals in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and the response from Temple faculty has been enthusiastic. We received 58 proposals over the three calls; 20 were selected for publication, an acceptance rate of 35%. Of these, three titles have been published and 17 are in process.

Temple faculty are committed to  improving student success by authoring  textbooks that are better suited for their courses than what’s currently available. They understand the financial challenges posed by expensive commercial textbooks and they have jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with the Press and Libraries.

A Transition From Purchasing to Collaborating: The Relationships Behind Open Access 

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Open Access week with a post by Ryan Mulligan, acquisitions editor at the Press, about our open access initiatives.

This week is Open Access Week, which celebrates the producers and distributors of information who remove the barriers to entry, namely cost but also legal apparatus, facing the potential readers who are trying to access scholarly work. There are plenty of open access models that attempt to resolve the impasse of cost-bearing, turning from readers as bearers of those costs to libraries, grant institutions, and universities themselves, the institutions that ultimately hold the standard for scholarly productivity. Temple University Press is acutely aware that the benefits of book publishing as a means of public scholarship—editing, design, and marketing, that work to lift the most urgent and rigorous signals above the noise in the sea of information available to seekers— come at a cost. In traditional publishing, costs lie with the reader, often represented by a library, seeking the information. As library budgets have either shrunk or been allocated to high-priced journal subscriptions, individual readers—be they scholars or students—have had to cover more of the cost. Unsurprisingly, many readers find themselves unable to bear that cost and the gap between those who can and cannot furthers inequality in academia.

To that end and with an eye towards the future of scholarly publishing, Temple University Press engages with a number of open access publishing initiatives in an attempt to lift those costs from the shoulders of readers. The Press submits books each year to the Knowledge Unlatched program, in which participating libraries select the books to be added to the collection. Publishers are then paid a set amount to help subsidize production costs in order to release the book in an open access ebook edition. Temple University Press also embraces TOME’s Open Monograph program, in which academic authors are subsidized by their participating universities to publish with a participating university press like Temple. I personally love the concept of this program, because in many disciplines, it is the university itself that holds book publication as a standard for tenure and promotion. TOME reconciles the cost of that standard. Temple also has been able to publish books open access through funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities through their open books program, in particular books in the Press’s excellent labor history backlist. All of the Press’s open access books are available on our Manifold platform. 

University presses are non-profit, mission-based publishers who want to see the good scholarship they publish in as many hands as possible, just as readers and the librarians who serve them want to access that scholarship, and just as authors want to be widely read and cited. Scholarly authors may not typically derive much income from their royalties, but their institutions reward them for having vetted and published their work. Institutions want to have the best published, most knowledgeable faculties to offer their students, and the healthiest knowledge environments in which their students and scholars can share and communicate. Similarly, institutions have a role to play in preserving the scholarly publishing apparatus necessary to vetting and broadcasting the work of their scholars. The scholarly ecosystem continues to need the backing that once came through university library purchases to fund the production and circulation of knowledge. Open access publishing acknowledges that the onus on facilitating the continuation of good scholarship is not on the individual buyer of a book but on the full scholarly community. 

As our authors compose their books, they depend on a lack of barriers to engage with and build on the knowledge base of their discipline. No one produces knowledge out of whole cloth and no scholar is taken seriously who does not draw on the work of others with the expectation that others will draw on their work. They quote short text excerpts and create tables of data collected by their fellow researchers. They cite established theory or build on promising new hypotheses. They illustrate their books with maps and illustrations released into the public domain or Creative Commons by creators who don’t depend on individual sales to continue their work—they have an institution backing them up. Scholarly book publishing already depends on open access scholarship on some level. If the scholarly ecosystem that institutions depend upon is going to continue to be healthy, that level is going to rise and institutions are going to have to meet that cost, if not through individual purchases, then through open access funding. 

There is risk in shifting power and responsibility from a market to a collaboration. Readers’ needs and interests must continue to be protected even if their power in bearing costs shifts. The potential in that shift is in rethinking the responsibilities of the many organizations and institutional parties who have a stake in the knowledge ecosystem.

Temple University Press’ NEH-Funded Open Access Labor Studies Titles Find New Readers Among Rutgers Students

This week in North Philly Notes, we interview Rutgers University Professor Will Brucher about Temple University Press’ NEH-funded Open Access Labor Titles.

In 2017, Temple University Press and Temple University Libraries received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make a selection of the Press’s outstanding out-of-print labor studies titles freely available online as part of the Humanities Open Book Program. All 32 titles are now available on the Temple University Press website, where they can be read online or downloaded in EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats. The titles are also available open access on JSTOR and Project MUSE.

To get a better sense of how these books are being used by new readers, Temple University Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Specialist Annie Johnson recently spoke with Rutgers University Assistant Teaching Professor William Brucher about how he has integrated the books into his own course curriculum.

First off, tell us a little bit about the class you are teaching this semester.

Labor and Employment History is an online graduate class in the Master of Labor and Employment Relations (MLER) program of the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There are 28 students enrolled in the class. Some are full-time students who will pursue careers as labor relations and human resource professionals in the private and public sectors, work for state and federal agencies like the Department of Labor and OSHA, or work as organizers and representatives for labor unions. Some are part-time students who already work full-time jobs in those fields.

How you are using the Temple University Press open access labor studies and work books in your class?

I have used several of the books in my weekly reading assignments. For instance, I assigned primary source documents from The Black Worker, Volume 1, edited by Philip S. Foner and Ronald W. Lewis, for a unit on race and labor in the nineteenth century, and chapters from Alone in a Crowd: Women in the Trades Tell Their Stories, edited by Jean Reith Schroedel, for a unit on gender and labor in the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition, each student in the class must complete an 8- to 12-page research paper on a labor history topic. This year, I asked my students to choose their topic based on the books in the Temple University Press labor studies and work collection, because it is such an excellent (and free!) resource. 

How are students approaching the assignment? 

The students have completed their first drafts and will do peer reviews before turning in their final drafts at the end of the semester.

They’re using nearly every book in the collection. Several students are exploring topics in women’s labor history, using Alone in a Crowd, edited by Jean Reith Schroedel; A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike, edited by Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson; Labor Education for Women Workers, edited by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer; Sisterhood and Solidarity, edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh and Mary Frederickson; Mary Heaton Vorse by Dee Garrison; and Sisterhood Denied, by Dolores Janieweski. One student is writing a comparative paper on women clerical workers in the U.S. and the U.K. using Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter, by Margery W. Davies, and Sameul Cohn’s The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing.  

Some students are writing about the experiences of Black workers using the volumes edited by Foner and Lewis. Others are writing about the difficulties encountered by unions in the second half of the twentieth century using The Crisis of American Labor, by Barbara S. Griffith and On Strike at Hormel, by Hardy Green. Another student is writing a paper on OSHA using Liberalism at Work, by Charles Noble, along with chapters from Alone in a Crowd and Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present, edited by James Green.  One student is writing about Philadelphia labor using Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850, by Bruce Laurie, and Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956, by Paul Lyons and another is writing about Massachusetts labor using With Our Hands, by Mark Erlich and David Goldberg.

Can you talk about the importance of this collection?

There has been an explosion of impressive labor studies scholarship over the past 50 years published by university presses, including Temple. Unfortunately, much of that scholarship has gone out of print, and resides primarily on the shelves of university and college libraries, making it inaccessible to many. It is wonderful that Temple University Press and Libraries pursued an NEH grant to republish some of the Press’s out-of-print labor studies online and open-access, free and available for anyone to use. I will continue to use the collection in the classes I teach and in my own research. Other labor studies and labor education faculty I know from around the country are also excited about this collection and are using it in their work.

Anything else you’d like to share with us?

Thanks to the Temple University Press and Libraries staff for your hard work in making this collection freely available!

Celebrating Open Access Week

This week in North Philly Notes, in honor of Open Access Week, we highlight Temple University Press’s efforts to promote barrier-free access to our books and journals. 

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge.” Temple University Press is proud to support barrier-free access to a number of titles, expanding their reach, eliminating barriers in resource-poor areas of the world such as the Global South, and supporting our authors in their goal of disseminating their research as broadly and deeply as possible.

From its outset the Press has participated in Knowledge Unlatched, a library-curated and -supported program that allows publishers to make select titles available open access. Publishers submit titles for inclusion in a Knowledge Unlatched collection. A selection committee made up of librarians evaluates the titles and chose those they deem most interesting for libraries and readers worldwide. The library community comes together to collectively fund the “unlatching” process and the titles are made freely available through OAPEN and the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Knowledge Unlatched launched with a pilot collection in 2014, which included the Press title Constructing Muslims in France: Discourse, Public Identity, and the Politics of Citizenship, by Jennifer Fredette. To date, 13 Press titles have been included in Knowledge Unlatched collections with a 14^th unlatching later this year.

In 2017, we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make a selection of our outstanding out-of-print labor studies titles freely available online as part of the Humanities Open Book Program. The titles were selected based on their impact on and ongoing relevance to scholars, students, and the general public.

As of October 1, 2019, all 32 titles are available here on the Temple University Press website, where they can be read online or downloaded in EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats. A print-on-demand option is forthcoming. All titles are also freely available on JSTOR and Project MUSE.

These labor studies titles have all been updated with new cover art, and 30 titles feature new forewords by experts in the field of labor studies. The forewords place each book in its appropriate historical context and align the content with recent developments in the field. The selected titles reflect a range of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and education.

In 2018, we announced the creation of North Broad Press, a joint open access publishing imprint of the Press and Temple University Libraries. North Broad Press publishes works of scholarship, primarily textbooks, from the Temple community. All North Broad Press titles are peer reviewed and freely available on our website in PDF and EPUB formats. Faculty responded to our spring 2019 call for proposals enthusiastically; we received 19 applications, from which 4 were chosen for funding with 2 addition open textbooks proceeding without funding.  These include titles in criminal justice, Spanish, physics, economics, and social work, among other areas.

In September the first North Broad Press title was released: Structural Analysis, by Felix Udoeyo, Associate Professor of Instruction in Temple’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The book is designed for upper-level undergraduates studying civil engineering, construction engineering and management, and architecture and can also be used by construction professionals seeking licensure in their field of practice.

The Press is committed to exploring other opportunities for open access publishing  and to working with the Temple community, Temple Libraries, and authors to create sustainable, impactful open works of scholarship.

Temple University Press and Libraries Make 32 Labor Studies Titles Freely Available with NEH Grant

This week in North Philly Notes, we recap our work reissuing out of print Labor Studies titles with the help of Temple University Libraries and an NEH Grant.

In 2017, Temple University Press and Temple University Libraries received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make a selection of the Press’s outstanding out-of-print labor studies titles freely available online as part of the Humanities Open Book Program. The titles were selected based on their impact on and ongoing relevance to scholars, students, and the general public.

As of October 1, 2019, all 32 titles are available on the Temple University Press website, where they can be read online or downloaded in EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats. A print-on-demand option is forthcoming. All titles are also available open access on JSTOR and Project MUSE.

The books have been updated with new cover art, and 30 titles feature new forewords by experts in the field of labor studies. The forewords place each book in its appropriate historical context and align the content with recent developments in the field. The selected titles reflect a range of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and education.

The NEH grant also made it possible for Temple University Press and Temple University Libraries to host several public programs in conjunction with the reissued titles. A program in November 2018 featured Sharon McConnell-Sidorick and Francis Ryan discussing Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 by Bruce Laurie. McConnell-Sidorick penned the foreword for the new edition. In April 2019, in support of Phyllis Palmer’s reissued book, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945, Premilla Nadasen spoke about how women of color organized after taking over domestic responsibilities from white housewives. And this month, William Jones will present a lecture entitled, “Remembering Philip S. Foner and The Black Worker,” reflecting on the eight-volume series The Black Worker, edited by Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis. Videos of the presentations will soon be available on Temple University Press’s blog, North Philly Notes.

Mary Rose Muccie, Director of Temple University Press, said, “Labor history is a key area of focus for the Press and today’s labor movement was shaped by many of the people and actions depicted in these titles. We’re grateful to the NEH for allowing us to reissue them without access barriers and help them to find new audiences.”

Annie Johnson, Scholarly Communications Specialist at Temple University Libraries added, “Thanks to the generous support of the NEH, we have been able to introduce these important books to a new generation of scholars, students, and the general public. We’re excited to continue to collaborate with the Press on other open publishing initiatives in order to further our shared mission of making scholarship widely accessible.”

About Temple University Press
Founded in 1969, Temple University Press chose as its inspiration Russell Conwell’s vision of the university as a place of educational opportunity for the urban working class. The Press is perhaps best known as a publisher of books in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as books about Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region. Temple was an early publisher of books in urban studies, housing and labor studies, organizational reform, social service reform, public religion, health care, and cultural studies.

About Temple University Libraries
Temple University Libraries serve as trusted keepers of the intellectual and cultural record—collecting, describing, providing access to, and preserving a broad universe of materials, including physical and digital collections, rare and unique books, manuscripts, archives, ephemera and the products of scholarly enterprise at Temple. We are committed to providing research and learning services, to providing open access to our facilities and information resources, and to fostering innovation and experimentation.

About The National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

The Value of University Presses

This week in North Philly Notes, we share “The Value of University Presses,”  which was developed by the Association of University Presses and captures the many ways the world needs presses like Temple. 

The Value of University Presses

University Presses are at the center of the global knowledge ecosystem. We publish works and perform services that are of vast benefit to the diverse scholarly network—researchers, teachers, students, librarians, and the rest of the university community. Our work also reaches out to a broad audience of readers, and ultimately to the larger world that depends on informed and engaged peer-reviewed scholarship published to the highest standards. Each University Press brings a distinctive vision and mission to its work. Yet we are all guided by, and united in, core values—integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom—that define who we are, the work we do, and the goals to which we aspire.

University Presses and Society

1: University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty and by scholars outside the academy.

2: University Press books, journals, and digital publications present the foundational research and analysis that is drawn upon by policymakers, opinion leaders, nonprofits, journalists, and influential authors.

3: University Presses contribute to the abundance and variety of cultural expression at a time of continuing consolidation in the commercial publishing industry.

4: University Press publications provide deep insight into the widest range of histories and perspectives, giving voice to underrepresented groups and experiences.

5: University Presses make common cause with libraries, booksellers, museums, and other institutions to promote engagement with ideas and expose the public to a diversity of cultures and opinions.

6: University Presses help draw attention to the distinctiveness of local cultures through publication of works on the states and regions where they are based.

7: University Presses seek a wide readership by publishing in formats from print to ebook to audio to online and by making publications available in accessible alternative formats for those with print-related disabilities.

8: University Press translation programs make available to English-language audiences vital works of scholarship and literary importance written in other languages.

9: University Presses rediscover and maintain the availability of works important to scholarship and culture through reprint programs and through revival of key backlist titles, often via open digital editions.

10: University Presses encourage cultural expression by publishing original works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and the visual arts.

University Presses and Scholarship

11: University Presses, through their rigorous peer review and faculty board approval process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship in order to maintain high standards for academic publication.

12: University Presses add value to scholarly work through careful editorial development; professional copyediting and design; extensive promotion and discoverability efforts; and global distribution networks.

13: University Presses include in their community a wide array of institutions – including scholarly associations, research institutes, government agencies, museums, and international presses – thus representing a diversified research culture.

14: University Presses recognize important fresh perspectives in scholarship by sponsoring work in emerging and interdisciplinary areas that have not yet gained wide attention.

15: University Presses sponsor and develop the work of early-career scholars through publication of their first books, which establish credentials and develop authorial experience.

16: University Presses publish established and start-up scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines that contribute to a thriving ecosystem of article-based scholarship.

17: University Presses actively promote the translation of works by English-speaking authors into other languages, making their scholarship available to researchers, students, and readers worldwide.

18: University Presses commit to multivolume publishing projects and dynamic digital resources, partnering with librarians, foundations, and other organizations on works of wide scope and enduring importance.

19: University Presses collaborate with learned societies, scholarly associations, and libraries to explore how new technologies can benefit and advance scholarship.

20: University Presses publish books, journal articles, and digital projects used in undergraduate and graduate courses as essential components of well-rounded syllabi and reading lists.

University Presses in the University Community

21: University Presses extend the mission, influence, and brand of their parent institutions, making evident their commitment to knowledge and ideas.

22: University Press publishing programs span the humanities, arts, social sciences, STEM fields, and professional schools, representing the full expanse of university research.

23: University Presses demonstrate their parent institutions’ support of research in essential academic fields – particularly in the humanities and social sciences – that are rarely supported by federal or corporate funding.

24: University Presses extend their parent institutions’ efforts at community engagement and outreach by publishing books of interest to their local communities and to a broader regional readership.

25: University Presses raise the public profile and reputation of their parent institutions by generating positive news coverage and reviews, receiving book awards, and maintaining active social media presences.

26: University Presses play a leading role in experimenting with and developing new platforms for delivering and engaging with scholarship.

27: University Presses partner with campus libraries, digital humanities centers, and other university departments to advance non-traditional initiatives in scholarly communication.

28: University Presses provide distribution and other publishing services to other university units and also act as distributors for independent publishers, ranging from established presses to innovative scholar-led initiatives.

29: University Press staff act as local experts for faculty and administrators, providing guidance on intellectual property, scholarly communication, and the publishing process.

30: University Presses engage in the teaching and learning mission by providing substantive work study, internship, and apprenticeship experiences for undergraduate and graduate students.

This essential document, articulating the value of university presses, was originally created in 2000 by a working group of three Association board members, Douglas Armato (Minnesota), Steve Cohn (Duke), and Susan Schott (Kansas). In 2018, the Association of University Presses invited Armato to form a new author group to update it. Our thanks go to him, Lisa Bayer (Georgia), Mahinder Kingra (Cornell), Erich van Rijn (California), and Stephanie Williams (Ohio) for this renewed statement.

Approved by the AUPresses Board of Directors June 2019.

University Presses Are Thriving, Not Broken

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost an article about the state of University Presses by Derek Krissoff, Director of West Virginia University Press, that appeared in Inside Higher Ed on October 2.

A casual observer might reasonably assume that university presses are in crisis, or deserve to be. Mainstream outlets routinely proclaim that “academic publishing is broken,” and the new documentary Paywall, currently making the rounds on college campuses, argues that “academic publishers are burdening the higher education market, contributing to the rising tuition fees at all universities . . . and, ultimately, limiting science and progress.”

Whether they say it or not (and Paywall, to its credit, does), these criticisms are directed at commercial publishers of expensive STEM journals rather than not-for-profit university presses, which specialize primarily in books in humanities and social science fields. Think Elsevier vs. the University of Massachusetts Press. The big critiques that make headlines and generate documentaries don’t generally mention university presses at all, leaving many to assume that they’re part of what’s depicted as the problem of rapacious scholarly publishers.

When observers do turn to university presses, the story’s often more grim than angry. Much attention is paid to threatened press closures; less to the opening of new presses or the frequent decisions to keep open presses previously slated to shut down. (How many people know that the University of Akron Press, noisily slated for closure in 2015, not only stayed open but had a finalist for the National Book Award last year?) “Several presses have closed and almost all are struggling,” intoned Richard W. Clement in 2011, distilling a gloomy timbre that persists in many assessments of the industry.

Variously erased, posited as a problem to be solved, and assumed to be dinosaurs on their way out, university presses are in fact, in their low-key fashion, thriving. There are more of them than ever before, and they’re doing better: sales in the industry were up 5 percent last year. That growth isn’t, moreover, coming from cash-strapped libraries. Only 20 to 25 percent of university press sales are to libraries (down from 70 percent forty years ago), and at the University of California, to pick one example, only 7 percent of library budget goes to books of any kind.

As anger spreads over libraries being squeezed by STEM journals from large for-profits, university presses are growing in part by looking beyond a narrow focus on library markets and publishing for new audiences, branching out into crossover titles, supplemental texts, regional books, popular reference works, manifestos, graphic novels, and the like. It’s an entrepreneurial flourishing that engages new readers, creates new communities, and extends the reputation of those universities fortunate enough to have presses.

At the same time, widespread predictions that university presses might abandon less profitable fields and undermine the career prospects of junior scholars seem not to have panned out: 83 percent of scholarly monographs find a publisher. Presses may be publishing new sorts of books, but not at the expense of traditional ones.

Technology, meanwhile, hasn’t changed things the way its most confident champions (some of whom predicted a shift to primarily online publishing) believed to be inevitable. At most university presses 85 to 90 percent of sales continue to come from print. While ebooks aren’t the gamechanger some technophiles expected, a different shift—the ability to print books digitally—has made a huge difference, enabling presses to do small print runs responsibly. When I started in publishing twenty years ago I was told a new book required an initial print run of at least 2,000 copies to be viable. Now we can do just a few books at a time, if necessary, making it easier to continue the mission-driven publishing at our core, even when audiences are specialized.

The growth of virtual spaces for publicizing books and building communities around publishing programs has been the other seismic change made possible by the digital turn. But the results of online marketing often show up in print sales and IRL interactions (think: nicely publicized bookstore events) rather than digital downloads.

So what about open access for books? The approach has promise, particularly for some specialized titles that don’t reward the high-investment model of conventional publishing. But OA publishing costs money, just like conventional publishing—money that comes from somewhere even if it isn’t the customer. Simply changing who pays for publishing isn’t necessarily progressive and can exacerbate or reinscribe inequalities. For example, plans to have authors’ universities cover the costs of publication ($35,000 per book, according to a study from Ithaka) may limit the pool of potential authors to those employed by wealthier institutions. Limitations like these may help account for the fact that only 1 percent of new scholarly books in English are published open access.

Saying that university presses are resilient, and that their recent history is characterized by continuity more than disruption, isn’t meant to suggest they’re static. University presses have always experimented, and they’ll continue to do so; they face challenges and, like the rest of the university, respond creatively. But university presses are best positioned to make the most of current prospects if they’re seen as valuable, not broken—if proposed changes are understood as having the potential to ensure a range of complementary publishing options, including the surprisingly durable model of traditional publishing.

Derek Krissoff (@DerekKrissoff) is director at West Virginia University Press, the only university press, and largest book publisher of any kind, in West Virginia.

Temple University Press: Committed to Sustainable Open Access

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Open Access Week.

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week, the 10th annual, “Open in order to…”, is intended to prompt thoughts and conversations about what is made possible by open access (OA) to research and scholarship.  For Temple University Press, OA editions of Press titles expand their reach, eliminate barriers in resource-poor areas of the world such as the Global South, and support our authors in their goal of disseminating their research as broadly and deeply as possible.

The Press supports OA in several ways. In April, we and the Temple University Libraries received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make 25 to 30 out-of-print labor studies titles freely available online. We’ve long been known as a publisher of groundbreaking titles in labor studies and are excited by the opportunity to bring these important titles, selected by an advisory board of scholars, to a new worldwide audience. Titles will be available on a custom website in epub and pdf form, along with a low-cost print-on-demand option.

The Press was an early participant in of Knowledge Unlatched and we’re proud to have had books selected for inclusion in the first three rounds (so far), including both frontlist and backlist titles. Timely titles Constructing Muslims in France: Discourse, Public Identity, and the Politics of Citizenship, by Jennifer Fredette, unlatched in 2014, and The Muslim Question in Europe: Political Controversies and Public Philosophies, by Peter O’Brien, unlatched in 2016, have been downloaded from OAPEN over 1000 times through June 2017 and similar use is happening on HathiTrust.

In addition, we’re one of approximately 60 university presses participating in the AAU/ARL/AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative. Rather than being funded by federal grant-making agencies or libraries, in this case the baseline publishing costs will be covered by an author’s university, should it participate, and the title, if it is published by one of the participating presses, will be made freely available online.  Under this model, universities show their support for and the value they place on the humanities and social sciences scholarship being created by their faculties.

As these examples show, we’re committed to sustainable open access and plan to continue to participate in initiatives that support the goals of scholars, students, our authors, and Temple University Press.