NEW YORK–The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) is celebrating the third annual University Press Week from November 9–15, 2014. The focus this year is on the vital collaborative projects spearheaded by university and academic presses with research libraries, scholars, and other universities around the world.
It is these alliances that keep university presses at the forefront of literature, theory, research, and ideas, making them stewards of modern thought. From the MLA’s Comedy of Errors, to Kent State University Press’s The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, to The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War from Brooking Institution Press, AAUP members have informed and entertained the reading public with quality narrative, research, and innovation—all born of collaboration. “Collaboration and collegiality are watchwords of our association, and university press publishers know that cooperation across all kinds of borders is vital to great scholarship,” says Peter Berkery, Executive Director of AAUP. “Now more than ever presses and institutions need to work together to make discoverable—and connected—the exciting scholarship being produced today.”
This year we will highlight those collaborations in an online gallery that will be live on universitypressweek.org on November 9th and also in an online discussion on Google+ moderated by Jennifer Howard from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Ms. Howard will be joined by Barbara Kline Pope, Executive Director for the National Academies Press and AAUP President, Peter Dougherty, Director of Princeton University Press, and Ron Chrisman, Director of the University of North Texas Press to discuss three innovative collaborations that cross the boundaries of nations, institutions, and disciplines.
- Princeton University Press and Caltech’s Einstein Papers Project provides the first complete picture of Albert Einstein’s massive written legacy.
- National Academies Press’s Academy Scope is a visualization of all of the titles that are available on NAP.edu, allowing readers to browse through the reports of the National Academies by topic area and seeing relationships between titles.
- University of North Texas Press teams up with the University of North Texas Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program and the University of Magallanes in Chile to introduce Magellanic Sub-Antarctic Ornithology. This project is the result of a decade of research conducted by scientist associated with the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve in Chile.
November 12, 2014, 1:00-2:00 PM EST
Collaboration in Scholarly Publishing Discussion
Presented on Google+
“The truth matters. Facts matter. Serious scholarship matters. If you value these things, buy your next book from a university press. Presses demand documentation of sources, enforce a rigorous system of peer reviews, and undertake a painstaking process of editing a work before it ever sees the light of day. The end product is something of value; it’s an honest search for the truth that represents the author’s best effort to get the story right.”
—Charles B. Kastner, author of The 1929 Bunion Derby (Syracuse University Press)
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.”
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