Money-saving collaboration between American university presses

Top university presses announce a collaboration to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow for more books to be released. Set up as a joint operation for copy-editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures, the collaboration will be funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The five university presses involved are: the NYU Press, Rutgers University Press, Fordham University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press.

The NYU will manage a $1.37 million grant to be spread out over five years. The grant includes royalties for authors and marketing funds. It is expected that Mellon will follow this grant with several others promoting collaboration, in sectors such as Slavic studies, ethnomusicology and East Asian studies.

The new system is likely to generate adequate savings to allow each of the presses to increase output by five books a year.