Univ Presses Face the Future in New Orleans

By Neal 

It took me a while to work through the GalleyCat inbox to get to a recommendation for Jennifer Howard’s dispatch from the Association of American University Presses conference for the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I’m glad I did. Howard reports on how attendees dealt with the theme of “Transformational Publishing: Lessons, Tools, and Strategies for Scholarly Publishing in the 21st Century,” which inspired a mindset one summed up gloomily: “The lessons I seem to be taking from all of this is that we’re screwed. But the old model wasn’t working anyway.” But not all the panels engaged in handwringing and/or wide-eyed optimism; it sounds like quite a few speakers had some pragmatic experience to bring to the table.