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indistinguishable from those of wholly commercial trade publishers.
University presses found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, they
had a foundation brief to publish original and often esoteric scholarship,
but on the other, they needed to achieve financial viability. They were
between an academic publishing rock and a financial hard place.
Sutherland (2007) has also commented on the differing standards of
university presses and their monographic output:
There are, as every wide-awake academic knows, presses with acceptance
hurdles so low that a scholarly mole could get over them. They edit
minimally, publish no more than the predictable minimum library sale
(200 or so) and make their money from volume. They repay their authors
neither in money nor prestige. They put out a few good books; and a lot
of the other kind. The best imprints (Oxford and Cambridge University
Press, for example) set the bar deterringly high. A scholarly kangaroo will
have trouble clearing their hurdle.
(Sutherland, 2007).
The £2 million losses of Cambridge University Press, however, as
reported in April 2009, mean that one of these two publishing
kangaroos has lost some of its publishing bounce. During 2008 and
2009 a number of smaller American university presses experienced
significant financial downturns, the University of Missouri Press and the
University of New Mexico Press, at the time of writing, being the latest
examples. In these trends, the university press often has become
disengaged from its parent institution. Within new frameworks of
institutional scholarly communication, the digital era provides the
opportunity for new models for the academic monograph.
New institutional scholarly frameworks
The Ithaka Report
University Publishing in a Digital Age
reaffirmed the
relative isolation of many American university presses from their core
administrative structures: 'Publishing generally receives little attention
from senior leadership at universities, and the result has been a scholarly-
publishing industry that many in the university community find to be
increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy' (Brown,
Griffiths and Rascoff, 2007). There are, however, increasing initiatives to
reconnect the university press to the scholarly communication process
