New Journal of Electronic Publishing issue edited by UM Press director lays out the digital future of university presses
University presses will have to collaborate more instead of competing, must employ digital processes and digital distribution throughout the publishing cycle, may produce interactive digital products that look nothing like books, and will have to engage closely with many more venues both within their home institution and beyond than they have in the past if they want to survive, according to the November issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, available today at http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org.
The issue is organized around the theme of “Reimagining the University Press” and guest edited by Phil Pochoda, Director of the University of Michigan Press.
“In the broadest sense, these essays can be read as attempts to discover how or even whether the presses will continue to play a valued leadership role in scholarly publishing, or if the most powerful publishing wave since Gutenberg will leave the presses stranded on an abandoned shore,” Pochoda writes in the Editor’s Note. “Most of the contributors to this issue seem persuaded that the presses can and will persist in more or less recognizable form by making substantial, digitally driven, adaptations in their traditional publishing functions and publishing processes, though some feel that the presses as a whole will be transferred to or even disappear entirely from a radically transformed (but still inchoate) system of scholarly and popular communication.”
The all-star roster of contributors to the issue includes:
Peter Dougherty – Director, Princeton University Press;
Kate Wittenberg – Project Director, Client and Partnership Development in Ithaka S+R;
Joseph J. Esposito – CEO GiantChair;
Daniel Greenstein – Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Programs at the University of California’s Office of the President;
Paul Courant – University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan;
Clifford Lynch – Director, Coalition of Networked Information;
Tara McPherson – Associate Professor of Critical and Gender Studies, USC. Founding editor Vectors;
Michael Jon Jensen – Director of Strategic Web Communications for the Office of Communications of the National Academies and National Academies Press;
Peter Brantley – Director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive.
The Journal of Electronic Publishing is produced by MPublishing, a unit of the University of Michigan Library that also oversees the University of Michigan Press. Follow The Journal of Electronic Publishing on Twitter: @JEPub.
Two extended articles have already appeared on the new issue. The first is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The second appeared in Inside Higher Education.
