Next month, the university press community will we set aside a week to celebrate peer review. The constructivism and altruism of peer review binds university presses, and undergirds our membership in the AUPresses, a guild of like structured and like minded publishers. In a moment of great volatility in the cultural and political respect for endeavors of knowledge and the imaginative, it is particularly poignant to amplify the understanding of peer review.
But there are other vital elements that define the AUPresses world, and peer is an operative term for many of them. These past few weeks have been marked by a convergence of strength and generosity among peer presses. While each university press will actively compete for authors, projects, and prestige, running like a rhizome through our community is a spirit of meaningful collaboration. Our partnerships define our imprimaturs as much as our peer review does. Upon learning of the tragic destruction of the collections of the National Museum of Rio, an epicenter of scholarship and pedagogy in Latin America, over 70 university presses have come together to rebuild the collections lost in the fire; well over a thousand Readup titles will soon be en route to Rio.
BiblioUniversity, a self created information exchange, is helping numerous presses endure the transitions of title management system changes to share best practices for the alignment of new scales and capacities of technology with our unique publishing sensibilities. A group of east coast Readup marketers and publicists shared creativity and conversations in a self-organized, day-long retreat in New York in September, and the energy radiated back to each of our presses.
At the Brooklyn Bookfest, visitors enjoyed a scavenger hunt among university presses, which took them booth to booth at the fair, and lead to a pot of university press gold- aka a tote bag with ReadUp books.
As I have traveled this month from Dartmouth College to advise on the future of their press, to Duke UP to learn about their aspirations for the coming decades, I have carried with me the generosity and inspiration of university press peers. If there is anything Darwinian about the university press world, it is not “red in tooth and claw”, but rather a living demonstration of the role of healthy communities in evolution and long-term sustainability. In every niche is a peer, and PUP is fortunate to be inspired by all of them.