Announced yesterday, the Utah State University Press will merge with the University’s Merrill-Cazier Library. Utah State is the latest in a growing number of university press and library partnerships and outright mergers. For example, the University of Michigan Press reorganized as an academic unit within the library in March 2009. 

Why are these partnerships and mergers becoming more common?  Stanford University Press, a division of Stanford University Libraries since 1999, offers this explanation:  the Libraries and the Press share a common purpose: to support research, instruction, and professional practice.

The economy is driving changes in scholarly publishing, as operating budgets are cut and libraries have less money to purchase books for their collections.  However,  the preferences of authors and readers of scholarly works are also drivers of change. Technology allows scholarship to take on new forms. Presses are experimenting with new publishing formats for monographs.  For example, see the press release from the Texas A&M University Press,  Mellon Foundation Funds E-Book Initiative.  Faculty, students, and lay readers are embracing e-books, but also scholarly electronic works that do not follow the traditional monograph format. Libraries are taking on new roles as publishers, or at least distributors, of scholarship.

Open access means free to read but it still costs money to produce a scholarly monograph. How will Utah State recoup the costs associated with peer review, editing, and design?  The press release does not say. Libraries are implementing robust services for faculty, and these publishing services may just be added to the existing suite of scholarly services.  University presses and libraries are crucial to a healthy system of scholarly communication. By working together– regardless of institutional organization– both can effectively serve the scholarly community.

To learn more about changes in university-based publishing, read the Ithaka Report, University Publishing in a Digital Age  (2007).  Also, Columbia University maintains a list of campus-based publishing partnerships.

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