The annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) will be held this week in Denver, Colorado. The University of Nebraska Press will have ten attendees this year and three people chairing panel discussions.

Members of AAUP will be arriving in Denver, Thursday, June 18 to gather for pre-meeting workshops and networking opportunities. Ambitious runners will be participating in the Mile-High 5K Run Friday morning before sessions. Concurrent sessions are held all day Friday and Saturday. Read more about the program here.

UNP sessions spotlight:

Should Scholarly Be Social? Big Questions and a Small Amount of Characters

Chair: Rosemary Vestal, Publicity Manager, University of Nebraska Press

Panelists: Casey LaVela, Publicity and Communications Manager, University of Washington Press; Alexa Colella, Journals Marketing Manager, University of Illinois Press; Dawn Durante, Acquisitions Editor, University of Illinois Press

A roundtable and “bigger question” discussion with younger members of the AAUP family as they consider the ‘What, Why, and What Ifs’ of social media and scholarly publishing. Leaving what university presses are currently doing behind, and looking forward to the possibilities that social media might offer, the panel will consider a fresh take on ideas such as: Does social media matter within specific fields? Can we trust authors to promote themselves using social media? Can a tweet sell a book? What could social media do for university presses, that it isn’t doing now?

“All university presses use social media but sometimes it feels as though there’s a lack of thought behind what we are producing online. I want to challenge UPs to think BIG and take our social tools to the next level to reach our audiences.” –Rosemary Vestal

 

Digging Deep into Epublishing: Back End

Chairs: Joel Puchalla, Journals Project Coordinator, University of Nebraska Press

Panelists: Julie Lambert, Production Coordinator, Journals, Penn State University Press; Anna Pollock-Nelson, Senior Publishing Technology Specialist, MIT Press; David Rech, President, Scribe

Once your content has been published digitally, how do you disseminate it as broadly as possible? And how much of a return can you expect on your investment? We explore the conversion of journals to e-books, repurposing content into new digital formats, and other methods for distributing journals beyond the standard online collections. This panel can be attended singularly or in combination with the “Front End” session.

“I’m hoping the take away for session attendees is that with a properly implemented XML workflow products that once seemed burdensome to produce can be quickly and easily created and might go a long way toward editor and reader satisfaction, thus strengthening both existing and future journal–press relationships.” –Joel Puchalla

 

Collaborating for Financial Success

Chair: Donna Shear, Director, University of Nebraska Press

Panelists: Robbie Dircks, Associate Director and CFO, University of North Carolina Press; Kathleen Keane, Director, Johns Hopkins University Press; Darrin Pratt, Director, University Press of Colorado

It’s important for university presses to be united and to collaborate in any number of areas, but we are in an age now where collaborating for definable financial success—either because of economies of scale or market power—is crucial. In this panel, we will present some of those success stories, including a mutually beneficial partnership between two scholarly presses (the Jewish Publication Society and University of Nebraska Press, as well as University Press of Colorado and Utah State University Press), a press bringing a number of common functions under one roof to achieve economies of scale for itself and partner presses, making the difficult decision to outsource its fulfillment and warehousing and what that has meant financially, and a look at how the university press digital collaboration, UPCC, has fared.

“As the scholarly publishing environment continues to present financial challenges, this panel, we hope, will give other presses some frameworks and ideas for their own collaborations that will result in greater stability and sustainability.” –Donna Shear

 

Not attending AAUP this year? Follow the conversations on Twitter using #AAUP15.