As both academic libraries and university presses struggle with budget pressures and the increasing dominance of networked technology in scholarly publishing, many institutions are establishing library-press partnerships in an effort to rethink the role universities play in scholarly communication. These relatively new collaborations vary in their organizational structure and priorities. How effective are these different models in integrating the priorities and cultures of librarians and publishers? What institutional factors influence how the library-press collaborations are structured, and how do the priorities and projects of different partnerships compare?
The panelists all hold key roles in pioneering library-press collaborations at major universities: Maria Bonn is the Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. She oversees the Library’s growing suite of publishing and scholarly communications initiatives, including the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office. Monica McCormick leads the Office for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University, reporting jointly to the Division of Libraries and NYU Press. She is a librarian who also worked for more than 15 years at the University of California Press. Charles Watkinson is Director of Purdue University Press, a unit of Purdue University Libraries. He previously worked as Director of Publications at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. He is currently one of the principal investigators on an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded research project looking to develop strategies for success in library-based publishing.
Sponsored by Columbia University’s Scholarly Communication Program, this event is free and open to the public. It is the second of three events this semester in a speaker series, Research Without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication, organized by the Scholarly Communication Program. Follow the series remotely via Twitter at http://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. Video will be distributed through the Program’s website and Columbia University’s iTunesU page, as well as on YouTube. For information about Research without Borders, please email Kathryn Pope at kp2002@columbia.edu, or visit http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events.