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"While there are new and enabling conditions for university presses to increase production and to widen distribution, the question remains: How can African university presses make the most of these opportunities? Most likely, the answer lies in deploying the technological changes in production, distribution and marketing made possible by digitisation and network effects of the internet.  At the same time, propelled by a growing perception in academia of 'robber capitalism' on the part of publishers as they protect their oligopoly in the face of dissolving spatial barriers and diminishing value add, we are witnessing a contrary trend: the emergence of the knowledge commons. However, this emergence takes place in an institutional context long dominated by an editorial logic and, in more recent times, by the logic of the market.  A holistic way of approaching the question of how African university presses can reposition themselves in support of the broader shift of some African universities towards a greater focus on research, is to consider shifts in the dominant institutional logic in the academic publishing industry. Based on a baseline survey of university presses in Africa, in-depth case studies of selected university presses, and an analysis of the publishing choices made by African academics, this research project examined the opportunities and constraints faced by university presses in Africa.  It provides an overview of the African university press landscape and shows that there is a small, active group of university presses. university presses in Africa are not yet making use of technological advances to reconfigure their production, distribution and marketing processes, nor are they experimenting with new publishing models such as open access. While case studies of selected university presses surfaced unsurprising challenges (such as scarce resources and limited capacity), they also show that university presses in Africa are constrained by institut

"On 11 March this year, a brief announcement by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Amsterdam University Press (AUP) marked the latter's transfer into private hands. The upbeat text conjures up a healthy image: a rigorous restructuring had saved an ailing organization. Following a dire diagnosis, AUP achieved a great "track record" and "international visibility" and was "stable and growing." "A good moment" presented itself to let AUP direct its own destiny, a "long-cherished dream" of its new owner, whose "network in the sector" reassured UvA Ventures Holding B.V., the company through which the UvA formally owned AUP, of the press's bright future."

"The open access model for publishing monographs by the members of the Spanish Universities Publishers Association (UNE) is analyzed. The study focused on production data from 2015-2017, as well as the positioning and arguments of the editors in relation to the open access movement, publication, related policies, and financing modalities. Data was collected by a questionnaire (with a response rate of 58% of the publishers associated with UNE) and includes in-depth interviews with seven of them. The results show that 75% of UNE members publish titles in open access, most consider open access a good way to increase the dissemination of monographs, and that there are no differences in content quality with non-open access works. Publishers do not see that publishing in open access is compatible with the commercial exploitation of printed copies. Publishers consider the most effective financing channels to be institutional payment (i.e., the university), followed by publisher's self-financing, and payment by the author."

"Author's note: With my colleague Karen Barch and the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I have been working on a project to determine how many books university presses publish, and in particular, how many of these could be termed original monographs in the humanities. The full report is available below as a PDF and also on Scribd. The text of this blog post is a slightly edited version of the report's Introduction. For the quantitative aspect of the study, I refer you to the full report.]"

"In April 2016, Heidelberg University's newly founded open access publisher heiUP launched the first volume of the new book series Heidelberg Studies in Transculturality. This article reports on the challenges, accomplishments, and setbacks that informed the entire editorial production process, not only of the first volume but also of the series and the publishing enterprise overall. The authors offer insights on crucial issues that any new open access publishing endeavour at an institution might face, namely acquiring manuscripts, designing and building workflows, and collaborating with partners to build an outlet for hosting the finished product. This article also illustrates how the goal of providing a new digital reading experience through an innovative HTML format, in addition to print-on-demand and PDF versions of each manuscript, affected the progress of the entire project. Finally, we report on what it took to deliver results."

"Higher education is stuffed with overpaid administrators squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of lecturers and focusing on the 'profitable' areas of science, technology, engineering and maths. Are the humanities at risk of being wiped out?"

"When researchers, funders, universities and libraries started thinking about open access and improving scholarly communication in the late 1990s, the focus was on access. Indeed, the most immediate challenge was to make it possible to access scientific literature resulting from public funding."

" This month, Kentucky's General Assembly overrode Gov. Matt Bevin's veto of the budget, restoring many of the cuts in education that Bevin had proposed in January. But the funding Bevin eliminated for the University Press of Kentucky was not restored. To remain open, the press has a rough road ahead."

"Each year, the coalition will invite non-commercial OA/OS services to apply for SCOSS co-ordinated funding. The SCOSS board will evaluate applicants rigorously based on criteria including the service's value to communities such as funders, universities, libraries, authors, research managers and repositories; and on details pertaining to their governance structure, costs, sustainability measures, and future plans."

"In 2014, my Mellon colleague, Helen Cullyer, and I sat in on a roundtable discussion of deans of humanities divisions in about 25 research universities in the U.S.  Of the questions that occupied them, one directly concerned the future of the monograph.  Wondering how they could make the humanities more interesting to their students, the deans observed that the present generation is immersed in the interactive web of multimedia to a degree that makes it harder for them to appreciate the book-based humanistic traditions. "

"his study tries to systematically identify claims about societal benefits of Open Access by analyzing different documents written by Open Access supporters. Three types of documents are used: key declarations and statements in support of Open Access, Open Access policies issued by public funding agencies and journal editorials announcing the adoption of Open Access. Analysis shows these three types emphasize different benefits for Open Access as they address different audience. There is strong support of the idea that Open Access has benefits to different groups of people outside side the university/credentialed research institutes. It is not clear how much evidence is available to support these claims, but identifying them would suggest new stakeholders to involve in the conversation and perhaps also inform the ongoing debate about who should bear the cost of Open Access."

"In the past decade, a number of initiatives have been taken to provide new sources of information on scholarly book publishing. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) has supplemented the Web of Science with a Book Citation Index (BCI), while Elsevier has extended Scopus to include books from a selection of scholarly publishers. More complete metadata on scholarly book publishing can be derived at the national level from non-commercial databases such as Current Research Information System in Norway and the VIRTA (Higher Education Achievement Register, Finland) publication information service, including the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) lists (Finland). The Spanish Scholarly Publishers Indicators provides survey-based information on the prestige, specialization profiles from metadata, and manuscript selection processes of national and international publishers that are particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In the present work, the five information sources mentioned above are compared in a quantitative analysis identifying overlaps and uniqueness as well as differences in the degrees and profiles of coverage. In a second-stage analysis, the geographical origin of the university presses (UPs) is given a particular focus. We find that selection criteria strongly differ, ranging from a set of a priori criteria combined with expert-panel review in the case of commercial databases to in principle comprehensive coverage within a definition in the Nordic countries and an open survey methodology combined with metadata from the book industry database and questionnaires to publishers in Spain. Larger sets of distinct book publishers are found in the non-commercial databases, and greater geographical diversity is observable among the UPs in these information systems. While a more locally oriented set of publishers which are relevant to researchers in the SSH is present in non-commercial databases, the commercial databases seem to focus on high

"Jyväskylä University Library and University Museum merged in January 1, 2017 into the Open Science Centre. It will provide reliable library and museum services to its customers."

"13-14 February 2018 saw ALPSP (Association of Learned and Society Publishers) in association with UCL Press host the second international conference for University Presses, called REDUX 18. "

"CON­FER­ENCE ON PHILO­SOPHY AND HIS­TORY OF OPEN SCI­ENCE #PHOS16 (HEL­SINKI, NOV 30 - DEC 1, 2016) Open communication has been a central cornerstone of research since the early days. In our increasingly data-intensive era, research practice and dissemination are facing new challenges as well as opportunities. What is the overall significance of the open science movement and what are, if any, the historical roots and varieties of this movement? This two-day conference brings together contemporary open science advocates and scholars to discuss particular themes relevant to openness in contemporary research practice, including reproducibility, transparency, reusability, politics of science, and other topics as well as their historical roots, in order to gain a broader perspective on these issues. Participation is free and open for the research and the general public"