In an unusual deal, Utah State University Press, which had been threatened with closure because of state budget cuts, will become a subsidiary of the University Press of Colorado consortium, the Utah Statesman reported. “If we hadn’t found this arrangement, the press would have closed,” Richard Clement, USU’s dean of libraries, told the newspaper. “It’s an extraordinarily unusual kind of arrangement and it’s a forward-looking arrangement.” Clement said that the Utah State press would continue to publish the same number of books, while the Colorado press takes on the attendant financial obligations.

“We think that it is the best of all possible solutions,” Clement said. “We certainly don’t want to see a shutdown. We have 40,000 books in a warehouse in Chicago, and we don’t want to send those to the pulper.”

Michael Spooner, the Utah State press director, described the Colorado…

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The Authors Guild and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit over mass digitization of books have asked the judge in the case to rule on the other side’s fair-use claim. The authors’ groups brought suit last year against the HathiTrust digital repository and the universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Cornell. At issue is the fate of millions of scanned works, many of them under copyright. The defendants have said their activities are protected by the First Amendment and by relevant sections of U.S. copyright law. In yesterday’s filing, the plaintiffs asked the court “to hold that defendants’ mass book digitization and orphan works projects are not protected by any defense recognized by copyright law.”

“This is the first motion that squarely places before a court the question of whether the unauthorized mass digitization of library books is a fair use under U.S. law…

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More than a year after it announced it was suspending operations at its well-regarded press, Southern Methodist University has decided it will give the press a second chance at life. In a statement sent to The Chronicle, Provost Paul Ludden confirmed the decision but left the specifics and timetable vague.

“After years of struggling to stay financially viable, SMU Press is evolving in a manner that we believe gives it the best chance to survive as a relevant, sustainable publisher in an evolving publishing world,” Ludden wrote.  “We plan to hire a new director for the press who will take a fresh look at the publishing landscape and reinvent the press.  We imagine that digital publishing and print-on-demand will figure prominently in any new venture.”

The outcry on- and  off-campus over the suspension led Ludden to study the question of whether the press could be made sustainable…

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The Association of American University Presses convenes its annual meeting next week in Baltimore. “Toward a Culture of Collaboration” is the theme this year, with an emphasis on what presses need to do to adapt and survive. This has, understandably, been a driving theme for the association’s members in recent years. In March, an AAUP task force released a report on “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses,” then invited people to comment on an interactive version posted on MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network.

Meanwhile, people outside the press community have been busy airing their own ideas about what the scholarly publishing of the near future will look like.

Late last month, the Modern Language Association announced the creation of an Office of Scholarly Communication, to be run by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at…

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Gregory M. Britton, the new editorial director of Johns Hopkins University Press.

The last few days have produced news of some important job shifts at university presses. Last Friday, Johns Hopkins University Press announced that it has hired Gregory M. Britton, head of the Getty Trust’s publishing programs, as its new editorial director. And today Yale University Press made public the news that Steve Wasserman, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, would be coming on board as editor-at-large, with a focus on general-interest books.

The Chronicle asked Britton, the new Hopkins editorial director, what had appealed to him about the job. “I am drawn to the opportunity to help shape a list that is both broad and deep in its scholarly reach,” he said in an e-mail. “My hope is to extend…

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Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard University Press) has won the $30,000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. The award was announced yesterday by the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, which administers the prize.

McGurl, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, argues in his book that “the rise of the creative-writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literature.” In the Iowa announcement, McGurl said he was “delighted by the irony that it is made in the name of a wonderful writer, Truman Capote, who contradicts most of the generalizations about postwar American fiction made in my book.” He added, “I’m proud to think that I have helped move the conversation about creative writing and the university forward a few steps, and shed new light on recent literary history, but humbled by this reminder that…

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On April 1, the new, Amherst-based journal The Common will make its official debut. For its editor, the writer Jennifer Acker, the venture is no joke but a serious attempt to establish a print-centric literary magazine that will, as its tag line says, deliver “a modern sense of place.” The editor points out the magazine’s broad geographical range, saying that they’ve already taken work from writers “in or from” Israel, Russia, the Netherlands, Britain, the Philippines, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States. “Our goal is to reach readers, writers, and artists from as far and wide as possible,” she says. In an e-mail Q&A with The Chronicle, Acker explained a little more about the guiding principles behind the journal, how she sees print and digital publishing co-existing, and why she thinks literary journals still matter.

Q. Why launch a literary journal now, given the enormous …

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The rush to market scholarly e-books keeps picking up speed. JSTOR, Project MUSE, Oxford U. Press and a consortium of mid-size university presses have all unveiled plans for e-book distribution platforms, hoping to provide scholarly publishers with better access to the library market. Now a fifth contender, Cambridge University Press, will soon announce that it too has struck agreements to distribute e-books for scholarly presses in the United States, Europe, and Asia, according to Frank Smith, the press’s director of digital publishing.

The publisher will build off its experience distributing its own e-books through Cambridge Books Online, which went live a year ago and contains more than 10,000 titles, according to Smith. In an email, he said that the program had been a global success. “Libraries in more than 15 countries, including the U.S., Germany, South Africa, India, Australia…

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JSTOR is getting into the e-book business. The nonprofit group known for subscription-based access to scholarly-journal articles has struck agreements with four publishers—Princeton University Press, the University of Chicago Press, the University of Minnesota Press, and the University of North Carolina Press—to make their books available online next year. The e-books program, “Books at JSTOR,” was announced today at the American Library Association’s Midwinter meeting in San Diego, according to a JSTOR spokesperson. The group also recently added current journal articles to its offerings. JSTOR was one of several groups, including Project MUSE and a university-press consortium, that has been exploring the possibility of collective e-book ventures.—Jennifer Howard



There’s a new university-press association in town. The Association of European University Presses made its official debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this month. Ten presses are founding members of the group: Amsterdam University Press and Leiden University Press (the Netherlands), ENS Editions and Fondation Maison Sciences de l’Homme (France), KIT Scientific Publishers (Germany), Leuven University Press (Belgium), and Northumbria University Press and Nottingham University Press (Britain). A number of other presses, representing 10 countries, have expressed interest, according to the organizers.

In a statement posted on the group’s Web site, Marike Schipper of Leuven University Press laid out some of the challenges facing scholarly publishers today. Many of them are familiar to anyone who works with or follows scholarly publishing in North America, but Schipper said that…

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