New York, NY, and Washington, DC — The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) is pleased to announce the redesign of its public website at www.aupresses.org in conjunction with the launch of UP Commons, an online community for Association members. Taken together, these new sites represent the diverse range and serve the broad needs of the growing AUPresses community, which now numbers more than 150 scholarly publishers in 17 countries.
The public AUPresses site evokes the global reach of Association’s membership by presenting its mission statement in 29 languages: “AUPresses advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge.” The translations display dynamically on every page of the site and can be referenced as a complete list. Many individuals in the AUPresses community—press staff, authors, and institutional allies—generously provided these translations; read about these people and groups at the site.
Visitors to the public site will also find:
- The Value of University Presses: 30 ways that university presses deliver value to universities, scholars, and society at large; as well as quick facts about AUPresses members—for example, the number of Nobel Laureates in Literature and Economics they have published since 2000 (13 and 33, respectively).
- News: announcements, statements on the latest policy area developments, an “AUPresses in the News” collection of recent articles about the Association, and more.
- Membership: a list of all members with links to their websites and information on becoming a member.
- Programs & Events: details about the Association’s Annual Meeting, webinars, awards, and annual celebrations such as the Book, Jacket, and Journal Show and University Press Week.
- About AUPresses: information about the Association’s governance, people, and history.
- Jobs List: a newly redesigned job board for positions at member presses.
Additional features of the site include:
- Resources Index: making the Association’s many resources (including those hosted on member-accessible UP Commons) discoverable.
- A list of our AUPresses Partners.
- A new For the Media page, gathering background information and files, news highlights, and more, especially for journalists.
“This vibrant new website truly expresses the Association’s mission, introduces visitors to our dynamic member presses worldwide, and showcases the wide range of our community’s activities and resources,” said executive director Peter Berkery. “As another major investment in the Association’s infrastructure, UP Commons invites sharing and dialogue—always essential to a global organization, but of particular value during the current pandemic—that will advance common professional concerns, refine best practices, and fuel community collaborations for years to come.”
AUPresses contracted with Fionta, a woman-majority and women-owned company dedicated to working with nonprofits and associations, to design and develop the new public site.
UP Commons, a proud part of the Humanities Commons network, hosts professional resources for AUPresses members on myriad topics, including advocacy, business data, equity and inclusion, journals, marketing, and much more; promotes professional development opportunities for member presses’ staff; and, through easy-to-deploy WordPress sites, has allowed AUPresses to quickly publish public resources such as the community’s pandemic reading lists this spring. It also provides a centralized space for discussion and collaboration forums for Association members, organized around professional interests, as well as workspaces for the Association’s Board of Directors and its 23 committees and task forces.
UP Commons was developed in collaboration with the office of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association (an AUPresses member), as part of Humanities Commons (HC). The development of HC, generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was based on the open-source Commons-in-a-Box project of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. It was designed by scholarly societies in the humanities to serve the needs of humanists as they engage in teaching and research that benefit the larger community. Under a new Infrastructure grant from the Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University will become the network’s hosting and fiscal sponsor in 2020.
“Humanities Commons is delighted to have AUPresses as a participating organization,” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of digital humanities and professor of English at Michigan State University. “This relationship will not only bring researchers who produce humanities scholarship into greater connection with the presses that publish it, but will also lead to new collaborations around the development and dissemination of new kinds of publications.”
The Association also looks forward to launching another public website, Ask UP, in the early fall. This site, developed by the AUPresses Faculty Outreach Committee, will be devoted to explaining how university presses work and demystifying the publishing process.
About the Association of University Presses
AUPresses is an organization of 160 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, the Association of University Presses advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds intellectual freedom, integrity, stewardship, and equity and inclusion as core values. AUPresses members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing.