Five university presses have reportedly announced a collaboration to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and allow for more books to be released. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the collaboration will set up a joint operation for copy editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures. The five university presses involved are: the NYU Press, Rutgers University Press, Fordham University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press. The presses will retain complete control over book selection and distribution.
The NYU will manage the $1.37 million grant to be spread out over five years. The grant includes royalties for authors and marketing funds. It is expected that Mellon will follow this grant with several others promoting collaboration, in sectors such as Slavic studies, ethnomusicology and East Asian studies.
The new system is likely to generate adequate savings to allow each of the presses to increase output by five books a year. The project comes at a time of increased interest in using collaborative models to make university publishing more economically feasible.
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