University press

A university press is an academic publishing house specializing in monographs and scholarly journals.

[3] Because scholarly books are mostly unprofitable, university presses may also publish textbooks and reference works, which tend to have larger audiences and sell more copies.

In the United States, colonial colleges required printers to publish university catalogs, ceremonial materials, and a limited number of scholarly publications.

Following the 17th-century work of Harvard College printer Samuel Green, William Hilliard of Cambridge, Massachusetts, began publishing materials under the name "University Press" in 1802.

The main areas of activity include monographs by professors, research papers and theses, and textbooks for undergraduate use.

However, the basic problem faced by scholarly publishers in India is the use of multiple languages, which splintered and reduced the base of potential sales.

[10] Oxford University Press opened a South African office in 1915 to distribute its books in the region.

[14] In Scotland Archie Turnbull (1923-2003) served as the long-time director of the Edinburgh University Press, 1952-87.

[22] University presses tend to develop specialized areas of expertise, such as regional studies.

In 2009, the CDC enabled the sales of electronic books directly to individuals and provided digital delivery services for the University of Michigan Press among others.

Only a few presses, such as Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have endowments; the others depend upon sales, fundraising, and subventions (subsidies) from their sponsoring institutions.

At Princeton University Press in the 1960s, a typical hardcover monograph would sell 1,660 copies in the five years after publication.

[24] University libraries are under heavy pressure to purchase very expensive subscriptions to commercial science journals, even as their overall budgets are static.

[27] These initiatives have collectively been dubbed "new university presses",[27][28][29] which the "Open-Access Toolkit", published by the OAPEN Foundation, defines as follows: These are university presses established since the 1990s, often explicitly to publish open access books.

However, as with library publishing ... NUPs are often library-led, albeit with an academic-led steering group or editorial board.