The Week in Review: University Press News

The last couple of weeks have seen some interesting developments both troubling and interesting. Troubling: The University Missouri of Press recently cut half its staff while the number of poetry readers continues to dwindle.

The interesting news includes the continuing migration of scholarly writing to digital formats. MIT joined Harvard and Stanford by adopting a university-wide open access policy for their faculty’s scholarly writing. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan Press will publish its monographs as digital editions but make them available via print-on-demand. Needless to say, their decision drew a variety of responses including those from Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed and from Mike Shatzkin’sIdea Logical Blog.

Of course, amidst all the news, University Presses continue to offer great new books. Here’s our semi-regular look at recent posts from university presses. (For those who want to keep up with university and independent presses, may we suggest the very helpful feedcluster that Jessica Bennet has created).

* The sad news about John Hope Franklin’s death was discussed on the blogs of LSU Press, the University of Chicago Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and Duke University Press.

* Griel Marcus’s Lipstick Traces gets a new look. (Harvard University Press)

* Scholarly journals are “like slow-food in a fast-food culture.” (Indiana University Press)

* “I’m a spectator of mathematics like others are spectators of soccer or pornography.”—Hollis Frampton (MIT Press)

* The author of Graffiti Lives talks about how vandalism can create community. (NYU Press)

* R. B. Bernstein responds to Rush Limbaugh’s use of his book Thomas Jefferson. (Oxford University Press)

* The authors of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism hit the road to discuss their book. (Princeton University Press)

* Peter Jan Hoingsberg, author of Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir, on the human consequences of the war on terror. (University of California Press)

* The University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, and Northern Illinois press receive a grant to support Early American Places, a new scholarly book series. (University of Georgia Press)

* The Madness of March. (University of Nebraska Press)

* Bloggers discuss History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. (University of Pennsylvania Press)