What is the point of a university press?

An excellent and thought provoking article. As the manager of a small, open access university press, UTS ePRESS, I second Paul Ayris's wonderful vision: “My dream is that every university will set up its own, or buy into a shared infrastructure," he says. "Together, we can start to reassert influence over scholarly publication and how material is disseminated. It really serves that public mission that universities talk about.” After 3 years of research and testing of various publishing technologies we are delighted to be partnering with the wonderful team at Ubiquity Press. They provide not only cutting edge scholarly publishing and global dissemination technology for peer reviewed research, but also a shared vision of the power and value of making that research open and accessible to any curious mind. And kudos to UCL Press: 2 million downloads across 100 titles in only a few years. This alone speaks volumes to the broader social benefit of unlocking publicly funded research! Scott Abbott UTS ePRESS University of Technology Sydney

A very interesting and thought-provoking article. I think I may have discovered an explanation for UCL Press's success: if their publications are being read ‘across 232 countries’ as Paul Ayris claims, it seems they must have found some extraterrestrial markets!

OUP does, of course, have other activities, but it could thus afford to cross-subsidize its academic output, but the prices of its new books are high and, depressingly, the prices of books in its back catalogue are outrageous. The consequences for other university (and public) libraries are disastrous and deleterious for ECRs trying to establish their personal libraries. In effect, Oxford, which has a legal-deposit library, is extracting money from other university (and public) libraries which they can ill afford.

As Director of University of Michigan Press, I don't recognize Ivon Asquith's claim that there is a “striking lack of interest” in open access among academics from the humanities and social sciences or that there is little evidence that masses of people are longing to read humanities and social sciences monographs – especially online, as opposed to in print. We are seeing unprecedented use of our monographs, and are continuously increasing the percentage that are open access -- 15% of our frontlist last year. Our real-time usage map tells the story: https://www.publishing.umich.edu/our-reach

Maybe university presses should explore the 'print on demand' market rather than having to go to the expense of printing, storing and distributing books in the traditional manner. With PoD, you provide an electronic text to a specialist printer who can accept orders either through the press or directly, print a book only when ordered and send it to the customer. The PoD printer sets a cost based on materials, the press or author may add an additional amount as 'profit' to give an overall price for the book. This method gives costings equivalent to large-run publication... and has the added advantage that the book doesn't go out of print unless/until the publisher or author decides to remove it from the catalogue.

Good article

To argue that “under the gold open access model, the cost of publishing is paid by the author“, is to grossly oversimplify. The costs are covered by the author, or the author’s institution, or a funder, or a learned society, or a subsidy, or an endowment. There are many ways to publish gold. Also, as an earlier article in THE showed: some academics self-publish (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/self-publishing-why-not). If they can afford to do that, why not publish gold-OA?