As part of University Press week, November 9­­–15, the American Association of University Presses (AAUP) broadcast an online panel on Collaboration in Scholarly Publishing via Google Hangouts. Moderated by Jennifer Howard, a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, the panel featured Peter Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press (PUP); Barbara Kline Pope, AAUP president and the executive director for The National Academies Press (NAP); and Ron Chrisman, director of the University of North Texas (UNT) Press. As Howard pointed out, lately collaboration can seem like a buzzword—“this year’s ‘innovation’ or ‘disruption.’” However, the three panelists’ discussion of their interesting and varied collaborative efforts showcased the diversity that academic publishing partnerships can encompass. Dougherty led off the panel, discussing the Einstein Papers Project, a scholarly collaboration between the Albert Einstein Archive at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which holds the rights to all Einstein’s intellectual property; the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech in Pasadena, which is in charge of editing the material; and PUP, the publisher. The first volume was published in 1986 and Volume 14, which brings Einstein’s life and work up to 1925, is about to be published; 25 volumes are projected in all. Pope described AcademyScope, a beta software application created in partnership with Indiana University’s Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center that visualizes and links 4,000 of NAP’s scientific reports. The idea was originally inspired by the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences, of which NAP is the publisher. “We wanted to do something that would juxtapose our history with the future,” Pope said. NAP is also planning a future iteration of AcademyScope for the humanities and the social sciences, which will involve seven or eight university presses working with Pope and NAP’s IT and marketing division “to help humanities figure out whether it can get more of the web rather than just on the web.” Ron Chrisman’s project, a three-book series, is a collaboration between UNT Press, the campus-based UNT Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Center, and the Universidad de Magallanes in Chile. The Chilean program was already publishing ethnobotanical and ornithological studies of the UNESCO-Cape Horn region when UNT came on board as a partner in 2009. The first book, published in 2010, is a traditional bird guide combined with folk tales, stories, and songs (on two CDs) about the birds from the Yahgan and Mapuche indigenous peoples. The second, Miniature Forests of Cape Horn, is a study of indigenous mosses, lichens, and liverworts. The third project is Magellanic Sub-Antarctic Ornithology, a bird studies guide accompanied by 22 scientific articles, half of which are translated from Spanish. Each of the publications has a bilingual component, and all three books are available in digital form, with audio available for download on the UNT Press website.

LIBRARIES AS PUBLISHING PARTNERS

All three had a strong interest in copublishing with libraries. UNT Press was reorganized several years ago to report to the library, and the two entities recently opened a joint scholarly publication office to handle the grey and other academic literature proliferating on campus. UNT is a founder of the Library Publishing Coalition, a startup venture dedicated to exploring the role of libraries in scholarly publishing. Dougherty explained that most of PUP’s campus-based collaborations are with academic departments, but that the university librarian, Karin Trainer, is a member of the press’s board of trustees and PUP consults her regularly on publishing issues. Pope also mentioned that AAUP has made it a point to build strong relationships with such organizations as the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Mellon Foundation, and a number of other library organizations. “If you’re a press looking for collaborations,” Chrisman advised, “go out onto your home campus and start talking…. It’s always a wise thing for every university press to make [itself] as relevant as possible.” And Dougherty added, “Collaboration has to be integrated into the strategic thinking of presses.” Economies of scale, he said, should be a strong incentive: “If you look at commercial publishing, the restructuring that has gone on over the past 30 years has created a handful of excellent but very large publishers that have the advantage of scale in a way that we can only imagine. To the extent that university presses have any chance of achieving some of…the advantages that come with scale, collaboration is a very important option.” Howard posed the question: In the age of Amazon, will collaboration be enough for university presses to survive? Dougherty thought it wouldn’t be enough by itself, but it would help—especially if done on a global scale. There are no panaceas in any of this, he cautioned, but there are ways academic publishers can join forces to strengthen their platforms. But how do you know when a partnership is a good one? “If you’re going to collaborate on something,” he said, “the lesson from the Einstein papers is: collaborate on something that matters."