Temple U. Press Director Alex Holzman Elected AAUP President
-- Library Journal, 8/12/2008 2:30:00 PM
Temple University Press (TUP) director Alex Holzman has been elected president of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) for 2008-9. He officially took the reins at the AAUP Annual Meeting in June, in Montreal, succeeding Sanford Thatcher, director of Penn State University Press. A 22-year veteran of the university press community, Holzman began his career in scholarly publishing at Ohio State University in 1986 before moving to Cambridge University Press, where he originated a consortia sales department and was responsible for developing new media partnerships. Holzman joined TUP in 2003, and has been a member of the AAUP Board of Directors since 2004.Holzman will helm AAUP during an admittedly stormy period, as he noted in his inaugural speech. “We meet under some darkening clouds,” Holzman told his AAUP colleagues, “worried about an economy that seems to worsen daily, about the continuing controversies and potential impacts of the various implementation schemes for open access.” Of course, such travails, Holzman optimistically added, are by now commonplace for presses. “I was reinforced in this belief when I recently re-read Bruce Wilcox’s 1994 presidential speech,” Holzman noted, “in which he worried about budget cuts, public support, copyright issues, and the complexities of digitization.”
In his address, Holzman said university presses remain concerned about open access and the effects of the “STM-serials crisis,” and, although he did not explicitly mention Georgia State University, he had some tough words for those questioning university presses’ participation in a lawsuit over the library’s e-reserve policy. “We can’t be asked by others to stand by quietly while we become collateral damage,” Holzman said. “I personally—and here I am speaking personally—am sick to death of people lobbing grenades into our front yard, then acting surprised we hurl our own back.” Fair use remains a “deeply complicated question,” he acknowledged, “but when an institution blithely copies any and all materials, then refuses even to discuss the matter, are we supposed to shrug, go to our parent universities and say, you’re either going to have to increase our institutional support by rather high multiples, or put us out of our misery?”
Holzman suggested, however, that there was “slow progress” in communicating to librarians, administrators, and faculty the true costs and complexities of publishing. “What we need here—and what I’m happy to say is beginning to show some signs of happening in various quarters—is for the moderates to take back the discussion,” he said. “If all of us in the scholarly community recognize that we are in this together, that we are actually on the same side, then together we can find ways to solve our problems in a way that achieves the goal we all share—the broadest dissemination of scholarship at the lowest possible cost.”
Meanwhile, institutional and funding issues aside, Holzman noted that presses are also facing challenges from a complex, burgeoning new marketplace. “We are all experimenting with new business models that account for real and anticipated revenue from electronic sales of books and bits of books, as well as various open access experiments,” he observed. “Perhaps more immediately, we are working out what freedoms and constraints the blossoming of short-run digital printing and true print on demand offer. Meanwhile, we encounter—seemingly daily—new companies offering to digitize this or that, streamline our workflows, store and repurpose our files, send email blasts to exactly the right customers, redesign our websites, disseminate our content far and wide, etc.”
