Johns Hopkins University Press Leader Recognized for Service to University Press Community
Wendy Queen, Chief Transformation Officer of Johns Hopkins University Press, has been named the 2026 Association of University Presses (AUPresses) Constituency Award honoree. The award, which recognizes staff at member presses for their contributions within the Association and to scholarly publishing in general, was presented today by Duke University Press director Dean Smith during the Association’s 2026 Annual Meeting in Seattle.
Queen has served the university press community with wide-ranging expertise in digital publishing for more than 25 years. Prior to taking on her current role at Hopkins Press, she led major advances in accessibility, metadata, and digital workflows as director of the press’s Project MUSE platform (2014-2024) and also helped transform its infrastructure to support open access content. She continues to guide AI integration efforts at the press and in the wider scholarly publishing community, focusing on collaboration, scalability, and sustainability.
“Wendy Queen has devoted her entire career to supporting university presses through digital innovation, sustainable revenue-sharing models, and visionary thought leadership,” said Smith. “Her extraordinary achievements at Project MUSE were accomplished with lean budgets and a dedicated and talented team that she assembled and who remain in place today.”
“Whether as a member of the AUPresses Board, a sought-after keynote speaker, a writer for The Scholarly Kitchen, or a visible voice promoting the importance of the humanities and the need for nonprofit alliances, Wendy is a leader, mentor, and collaborator, always humble and generous with her time,” said nominator Lauren Kane, CEO of BioOne.
Nominator Anthony Cond, director of Liverpool University Press, lauded Queen as “the university press world’s foremost advocate for long-term digital strategy around journals,” and added, “Now, as Chief Transformation Officer at Hopkins Press, she is modelling the change many of us need to make for long-term sustainability.” Cond and other nominators particularly praised Queen’s keynote presentation, “The Necessary Transformation of University Presses,” at the 2026 University Press Redux conference in Liverpool, where she called for university presses to act together, driven by shared values, to meet generative AI’s challenges to scholarship and publishing.
“Wendy is a highly respected expert on all things technology and is a resource throughout the university press community on that topic. But she doesn’t embrace technology for technology’s sake,” said nominator and Hopkins Press executive director Barbara Kline Pope. “She is focused on how we can harness technology to meet our mission to make an impact for our authors and be financially sustainable at the same time.”
A former AUPresses Board of Directors member (2022-2025), Queen has also served on the Association’s Digital Publishing Committee (2014-2016) and has been a voice for university presses on boards and committees of the Association of American Publishers, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, CrossRef, the OA Book Usage Data Trust, and OAPEN, among other groups. She has served as a Principal Investigator on Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and has advised and reviewed numerous grant proposals.
The Association recognizes and thanks Queen for her vision and significant contributions to the advancement of university press publishing.
Read more about the history of the Constituency Award and see its complete Honor Roll.
