University Presses bullish about acceleration of transition to digital

Following a tough year, university presses have adapted their working practices to deal with the accelerated move to digital—and most are bullish about what comes next. 

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses), which has 154 members worldwide, reached out to press directors last month and received more than 80 responses. Most reported that, after a late-spring slump, sales were better than expected. 

This was the case for Cambridge University Press (CUP), which saw a sharp fall in sales following the lockdown of most schools and universities. Print sales have now partially recovered, but Mandy Hill, managing director of CUP’s academic publishing, says the pandemic has clearly “accelerated the shift to digital for both institutional and individual customers”, and she expects that trend to continue. 

Sales income for the University of Wales Press (UWP) dipped from March to May as warehouses, academic libraries and bookshops closed, followed by a recovery in the summer and a “levelling off” in the autumn. Other challenges for the list included cancelled events and uncertainty over what the new academic year would look like. UWP had to delay areas of its strategic progress and some authors struggled to balance writing with other commitments. Despite the difficulties, UWP director Natalie Williams is “grateful that the picture is not as bleak as we first anticipated”. She adds: “One of our challenges now is to try to predict future purchasing. How many of our pandemic behaviours will hold when some of our ‘normal life’ returns?” 

Goldsmiths Press director Sarah Kember says that the sector is currently facing a recruitment and pay freeze, closures of courses, degrees and departments, and the termination of fixed-term employee contracts. She also cites the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ estimation that the UK’s Higher Education (HE) sector will face a shortfall of between £3bn–£19bn in 2021. However, Kember is adamant that the challenges are “much wider and more fundamental than those posed by lockdowns”. According to Kember, conditions within the UK HE sector were already “unsustainable in terms of the absence of direct public funding for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS), business models reliant on an unstable global market for postgrad students, and spiralling workloads”. She also states that prior to the pandemic, unfunded or underfunded Open Access (OA) was “set to exacerbate structural inequalities within and between institutions globally”. 

On a more positive note, Liverpool University Press (LUP) managing director Anthony Cond says that this year has enabled presses “the unique opportunity to reset spending”. He also feels there have been benefits to conferences and events moving online, such as increased engagement and financial savings. While he acknowledges the downsides of remote working, and that “the supply chain disruption of the early days of the first lockdown has now given way to the inevitable budgetary disruption faced by our core university library market”, Cond is optimistic about LUP’s ability to “navigate the choppy waters ahead”. 

A new perspective
Williams points out that the shift to digital has offered “huge opportunity”, and that it has been “a great time for the industry to pull together and think outside of the box”. This is echoed by Peter Berkery, executive director of AUPresses, who reports that many presses have taken advantage of remote working to invest time, energy and thought into their digital work processes as well as, in some cases, accelerating the digitalisation of their backlist. 

At CUP, the most notable impact of the pandemic has been the increased demand for online learning materials. As such, the press brought forward the launch of its new textbook platform by six months, and created a new business model to match market realities. David Clark (pictured), managing director of Oxford University Press’ academic division, agrees that the demand for quality research and teaching material “has never been higher”. While consumer sales have remained “surprisingly strong”, institutional customers have “moved wholeheartedly to digital formats”, Clark said. 

Though UWP has seen some benefits to digital events, Williams worries that not being able to catch up with colleagues across the industry will have a broader impact over time. She also believes that this is a chance to rethink “how necessary some of the ‘rules’ we abide by are”; so while UWP has retained important work processes, it has also “streamlined and removed a lot of the paper-pushing”. The press recently introduced more flexible working hours to enable colleagues to make the most of the daylight over winter, and hopes to retain this flexibility when staff return to the office. Williams explains: “If it means that colleagues feel happier and less restricted, then that can only be a good thing in terms of their wellbeing, not to mention their creativity and productivity. The rigid nine-to-five may become a thing of the past.” 

This reflects AUPresses’ findings that some pandemic working practices will stay in place going forward. Most respondents to AUPresses’ survey anticipated a continuation of conservative budgeting and limited travel, while they believe that university presses in general will “continue to be nimble and responsive to changing circumstances”. 

Quality control
Clark points out that customers are working in “different, uncertain situations” too, so the industry needs to support wellbeing. He also describes this time as “a real opportunity to help drive forward the transition towards OA”, but adds: “At the same time, it’s vital that access isn’t prioritised over quality. The pandemic has heightened concerns around misinformation and highlighted the important role publishers play in upholding editorial integrity.” Looking ahead, he predicts there will need to be an increased focus on diversity in authorship, and says publishers have a valuable role to play in tackling societal issues. 

Kember thinks that post-Covid, there will be an acceleration of the “destructive” restructuring of the HE sector. She worries that the pandemic “legitimises the endgame for public funding of research and publishing in AHSS” and that funded research will be “increasingly instrumentalised and operationalised”. To counter this, she believes there needs to be a project of “rebuilding scholarly communications across teaching, research and publishing by means of closer collaboration between university presses and the academy”, as well as new partnerships. 

To this end, Goldsmiths Press is working with the Knowledge Futures Group to explore the possibility of building infrastructure for sustainable OA and scholarly communications across publishing and the academy. The press and Goldsmiths University are also working together on a new, staff-led schools outreach project to showcase their creative practice, build closer consultation across the sectors and produce concrete outputs demonstrating the value of AHSS to government and education policymakers. In addition, the press is working with feminist and social-justice journal editors to explore the future of journal publishing after OA, and it is launching a feminist science-fiction imprint, Gold SF, 
next year. 

Next year, UWP will continue its digital focus and it is currently reviewing its inclusivity and diversity agenda. In 2022 it will be the press’ centenary year—for which Williams promises the launch of “exciting plans and developments”, as well as “celebrations and milestone publications”—and a new Welsh curriculum will also be introduced. More generally, Williams predicts that university presses will “continue to navigate developments in the market: Open Access, a new Research Excellence Frame cycle, the squeeze on academic libraries, and so on”. 

From August 2021, CUP will merge with examinations group Cambridge Assessment. Hill says: “There is a lot of work to do between now and then, and we will also continue to innovate and to develop our platforms, products and services across academic, English Language Teaching and education publishing.” Other major areas of focus include diversity and inclusion, where it will shortly be advertising for a new role to lead its work, and sustainability. 

Hill predicts: “The pandemic will continue to be a major factor for university presses next year, as we and our universities feel the impacts, both directly and through the effects on the economy and society more widely. All university presses are going be adapting to the accelerating moves to digital and, in academic publishing, to open research.” 

Clark adds: “The future is still uncertain, and it is too early to understand the longer-term impact of the pandemic. But what we can say with some certainty is that the importance of academic research and teaching materials—whether they are published in print or digitally—remains unchanged.”