University Press Week 2015 – Online Panels

“My work as a journalist has been richly and continuously informed by the world of ideas offered by university presses over the years. I can’t imagine the life of the mind in America today without them.” —Bill Moyers

Fourth Annual University Press Week Highlights the Most Surprising Aspects of Scholarly Presses

This year the Association of American University Presses gathers both online and on campuses around the world for University Press Week from November 8-14, 2015. The AAUP is celebrating scholarly publishing concurrent with the first annual Academic Book Week (Nov. 9-16, 2015), a program of the UK-based Academic Book of the Future project.

University presses are full of surprises each year and this year we didn’t have to look hard to find the unique and special ways that these presses make their mark on the world. From University Texas Press’s James Beard winner Yucatán to Princeton University Press’s 150th Anniversary Edition of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dali and Ohio University Press’s illustrated, YA novel Trampoline, this has been a year of outstanding publishing from university presses. All the while, university presses continue to publish the best scholarship from the foremost thinkers working today and continue to garner awards and media attention in vast numbers for their work. University presses worldwide are proud to create these varied, often surprising, and always incredibly well researched publications for students as well as armchair scholars, librarians, journalists, booksellers, and general readers alike.

Join us online for two events during UP week this year, “Opening Access: The Reinvention of the Academic Book” and “It’s Not Scary: The Art of Getting Published with a University Press.” And for the annual blog tour featuring a theme for each day of the week including, this year, “Surprise!” Design, Throwback Thursday, conversations between authors and their editors, and The Future of Scholarly Publishing. (The Columbia UP blog will take part in the blog tour with a post about our exciting new Russian Library series on Friday, 11/13!)

Opening Access: The Reinvention of the Academic Book
When: November 10; 3:00pm Eastern
Where: Google+ Hangouts on Air

Moderated by: Jennifer Howard, Senior Reporter, Chronicle of Higher Education
Speakers: Frances Pinter (Manchester University Press/Knowledge Unlatched), a publisher of both traditional print and innovative Open Access monographs; Peter Suber (Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet & Society), one of the foremost theorists of Open Access; Augusta Rohrbach (author of Thinking Outside the Book), a scholar of book culture embedded in a world of digital communications; and Matthew K. Gold (CUNY Graduate Center), who, with the team on the Manifold project, is transforming scholarly publications into living digital works. Co-sponsored by Academic Book Week

There are two parallel streams of technological and cultural change that drive the debate over how to publish the best scholarship and in the best way: the model for access to scholarship and the format or process for “publishing” (particularly in the long-form focused fields of the humanities and social sciences.)

It’s Not Scary: The Art of Getting Published with a University Press
When: November 13th 12:00 pm Eastern
Where: Google+ Hangouts on Air

Moderator: Ada Brunstein, Executive Editor, Oxford University Press
Speakers: Jennifer Crewe, Director, Columbia University Press, Brian Halley, Senior Editor, University of Massachusetts Press, Christine Henry, Editorial Director, Science, Social Science, and Reference The University of Chicago Press, Ivan Lett, Director of Communications, Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Join us on Friday the 13th to take the scary out of scholarly publishing. Getting from idea to published book can be tricky to navigate. This panel will discuss tips and strategies for working with scholarly presses on every step of the publication process—from proposal to sales and marketing.

The inaugural University Press Week was held in November 2012 and was part of AAUP’s 75th anniversary festivities. On the eve of that inaugural event President Jimmy Carter said, “When as president I proclaimed a ‘University Press Week’ in 1978, I did so to honor the important role of university presses in advancing and preserving knowledge. Since then my personal appreciation and understanding of university presses has deepened. I am glad that University Press Week will again be celebrated. The special character and contribution of university presses should be better known and better supported.”