The Founding and Early Years of the Press
The origins of the Pennsylvania State University Press date back to 1945, when a committee at the University was appointed "to study the advisability and practicability of establishing a Pennsylvania State College Press." Even earlier, in 1942, an editorial appeared in the student newspaper, Daily Collegian, asking the question “Why not a Penn State Press?” This question resurfaced in the Collegian again in October 1946 when a student named Seymour Rosenberg argued the case for founding such a press, thinking of it primarily as a publisher of textbooks written by Penn State faculty for undergraduate use: “If Penn State had its own publishing house, all of its materials would go into the printing of books by Penn State authors only, thus assuring students of books for their varied courses.”
A decade later a different vision was promoted by the Penn State chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which had been advised by Victor Reynolds, director of Cornell University Press. The group recommended to President Milton S. Eisenhower that a university press be established, as the Collegian reported on December 14, 1955, “to publish academic works which commercial publishing houses rarely accept because of their limited market.” The Collegian story went on to say: “It was estimated that an original sum of $15,000 would be enough to start the press operating.” The projected cost was low mainly because it was envisaged that the primary function of the press would be editorial, with “an organization of faculty and administrative personnel who will select suitable manuscripts and have them published, promoted, and sold through a cooperative arrangement with a long-established university press,” as the Centre Daily Times reported on March 29, 1956.
A few years earlier, in 1953, as a first venture into university press publishing at Penn State, the Department of Public Information (then directed by Louis H. Bell) had issued a book titled Penn State Yankee: The Autobiography of Fred Lewis Pattee, which Bell himself edited and designed. This undertaking evidently had proved successful enough to persuade the Board of Trustees at its meeting in March 1956 to launch the Pennsylvania State University Press "on an experimental basis." In September President Eisenhower appointed a committee of five faculty members “to set the policies and guide the affairs of the University Press in its first year.”
The mandate of the Press, in the words of the proposal dated March 16, 1956, was "to make the products of scholarship and research available to all, scholar and layman alike, . . . [through] publication of books and periodicals of quality and distinction, … which would supplement the primary objectives of the University: understanding and scholarship.” It underlined the need for publishing “books of limited interest” but of value for their scholarship or contribution to regional studies. It also emphasized the University’s need for a press “to keep pace with neighboring and comparable institutions of higher learning,” noting that “Penn State is alone among the large universities of Pennsylvania in its lack of a university press” and that, “among land-grant colleges, Penn State is one of the very few missing on the university press list.” In this situation, “it might be well to ask whether these Pennsylvania colleges and land-grant institutions with which we compete for faculty talent might not be in positions of advantage because of the opportunity their presses provide staff members for professional and scholarly growth.”
The first director of the Press was Louis Bell, who resigned from the Department of Public Information in 1958 to devote more time to running the Press and to teaching journalism. Unfortunately, he died later that year, the same year the Press issued its first book, Edward J. Nichols’s Toward Gettysburg: A Biography of General John F. Reynolds.
The Press under T. Rowland Slingluff (1959-1972)
T. Rowland Slingluff, then director of the newly formed Department of Publications, was named acting director of the Press, having come to Penn State from Baltimore with degrees in international relations and experience in editing engineering reports and technical articles. The University confirmed his appointment as director in 1959, the year the Press published its second title, Henry Johnstone’s Philosophy and Argument. In that year also the Press established its first advisory committee to assist the director in the selection of manuscripts for publication. The committee consisted of six faculty members who were appointed by Penn State’s president to three-year terms.
Under Slingluff's direction the Press's publishing program gradually gained momentum, and by the time he resigned in 1972 the Press had a backlist of over one hundred and fifty titles. The list spanned a variety of disciplines, but almost from the beginning manifested strength particularly in two fields, art history and literary criticism. In 1960 the Press became a member of the Association of American University Presses. In recognition of its growing reputation and more secure status, the Press moved out of Old Main into its own offices on Shortlidge Road in a remodeled cottage that had once been the boyhood home of best-selling author (and Penn State alumnus) Vance Packard. Toward the end of 1968, as the staff increased further, the Press moved again, this time to the second floor of the Wagner Building.
During Slingluff’s tenure the Press also began publishing journals, two of which it launched as new journals: Chaucer Review in 1966 and Philosophy and Rhetoric in 1968. JGE: Journal of General Education, which had begun its life at the University of Iowa in 1946 and then moved to the University of Chicago in 1948, was taken over by the Press in 1961, and General Linguistics in 1967.
The focus of the Press during these early years was clearly on publishing scholarly monographs and journals in the humanities, although the list had a sprinkling of titles in the social sciences and natural sciences, too. The Press engaged in a few other special ventures, especially in music publishing. The Penn State Music Series edited by Denis Stevens, which existed from 1963 to 1971, issued in large paper format the transcribed and annotated scores of classical music that had long been unavailable. In 1965 it was announced that RCA Victor would distribute the Press’s first recording, The Cries of London and Music in Honor of Queen Elizabeth I, and in 1966 the Press’s catalogue advertised four stereo LPs, among them Secular Spanish Music of the Sixteenth Century.
As a service to the University the Press also distributed short monographic works in a series begun in 1936 known as Penn State Studies that gave visibility to research by faculty affiliated with the University. Of the fifty titles that appeared in the series, probably the best known were the last two, both published in 1988: Peter Houts et al.’s The Three Mile Island Crisis and Robert Murray and Tim Blessing’s Greatness in the White House.
In the months following Slingluff's resignation in 1972, the Press continued to go about its business with Professor Stanley Weintraub serving as acting editorial director and Forrest Remick, then Assistant to the Vice President for Research, assuming budgetary responsibility for the Press. Meanwhile, the University conducted a thorough review of the Press's operations and objectives, calling upon directors of other presses as consultants. Eventually, after it was decided that the Press should be separated from the Department of Publications, the Press was removed from the Provost’s portfolio and placed as a unit within the office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, where it remained for the next thirty-two years.
The Press under Chris Kentera (1973-1988)
In March 1973 a new director, Chris Kentera, was appointed and given a mandate to increase the size and diversity of the Press’s list. Kentera was the first director of the Press to have had considerable experience in book publishing, both in the commercial and academic sectors, and as director of the New York University Press he had managed to quadruple its annual title output. Under his leadership, with the able assistance of Editor-in-Chief John Pickering and later Senior Humanities Editor Philip Winsor, the Penn State Press made significant progress in raising its annual output to about thirty titles a year on average. By the time he retired in March 1989, the Press’s backlist had grown to nearly six hundred titles, covering a broader span of subjects than ever before. A Press newsletter of this period claimed that the Press “publishes in any area of recognized scholarship from Chinese technology through French heraldry, pig production, to atomic fission.”
Besides this growth in the book program the Press added to its stable of journals. Three new journals were launched: SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies in 1981 (a successor to The Shaw Review, a triannual journal the Press had published since 1967), Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1987, and Journal of Policy History in 1989. Another already existing journal migrated to the Press, Comparative Literature Studies (previously published by the University of Illinois Press), in 1987.
Kentera was also responsible for setting up a series of regional titles called Keystone Books and for working out agreements to publish series for the College Art Association of America and the American Academy in Rome. Significant developments in the business operations of the Press during this period included the computerization of order fulfillment for books and journals and the transfer of inventory from a commercial warehouse in Scranton to an on-campus facility in 1980.
The Press under Sanford Thatcher (1989- )
A new era at the Press began when Sanford Thatcher became the director in June 1989. Thatcher had spent his previous twenty-two years in publishing all at Princeton University Press, where he had advanced from copyeditor to social science editor to assistant director and finally to editor-in-chief. His mandate from President Bryce Jordan was to further increase the Press’s profile as part of the University’s ambition to move Penn State into the ranks of the top ten public research universities in the country. Jordan’s vision for the Press was foreshadowed in an interview he had with State College Magazine in November 1985, when he said: “You’re going to continue to see an emphasis on something that I don’t think this community knows very much about and thus cannot appreciate—the Penn State Press, which is among the better university presses in the country. Very distinguished record. It’s just one little part of being a good institution on the humanities side, or on the scholarly side, versus the technical side.” Jordan clearly understood that to realize his ambition for the University meant strengthening its standing in the liberal arts where the Press could play a significant role.
One of Thatcher’s first objectives was to make the Press a more efficient and effective operation by computerizing many of its functions and adding new staff in key positions. The upgrade in technology and expansion of staff were both facilitated by the Press’s move to a brand new building in1990 at the edge of campus where it remains today. Editorially, Thatcher aimed to enhance the Press’s reputation for distinguished publishing both by consolidating its strengths in core areas like art history and literary criticism and by expanding the scope of the list within liberal arts to build more systematically in fields like philosophy, religion, history (mainly U.S. and European), and some of the social sciences (especially political science and sociology). Over time the Press also became well known for its focused publishing in the interdisciplinary fields of Latin American Studies, Medieval Studies, and Russian and East European Studies.
New Series
One area of significant growth in the book program was the inauguration of many new series, some purposely designed to build bridges across disciplines. Among the latter were Literature and Philosophy, edited by Anthony J. Cascardi of the University of California, Berkeley, and founded in 1991, and Re-Reading the Canon, edited by Nancy Tuana, who was at the University of Oregon when the series was launched in 1993 but has since moved to Penn State to head its Rock Ethics Institute. Several of the series were editorially based at Penn State from their beginning: Penn State Series in the History of the Book edited by James West; Penn State Studies in Lived Religious Experience edited by Judith Van Herik; Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures edited originally by Fred De Armas and Alan Knight; Penn State Library of Jewish Literature edited by Baruch Halpern and Aminadav Dykman; American and European Philosophy edited by Charles Scott and John Stuhr (both at Penn State when the series started in 1999, but both now at Vanderbilt University); and, most recently, Latin American Originals: Colonial and Nineteen-Century Primary Sources edited by Matthew Restall. Many of these series were inaugurated at the instigation and under the oversight of Senior Humanities Editor Philip Winsor, who contributed in many vital ways to the resurgence of the Press’s editorial program until his retirement in 1998.
Some new series resulted from the establishment of formal relationships between the Press and various associations: Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series, co-published with the Pennsylvania German Society, and the Rural Studies Series, sponsored by the Rural Sociological Society. One series, Post-Communist Cultural Studies, was replaced by another, Essays on Human Rights, as the interests of its editor, Tom Cushman of Wellesley, shifted. Another series, Issues in Policy History, was started as a supplement to the Journal of Policy History, which began each volume with a special thematic issue, suitable for classroom use once made available in a separate paperback edition. A few began as co-publication ventures with British and European companies: the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid with the University of Edinburgh Press; Magic in History with Sutton Publishing; and Medieval Women with Brepols. And two in art history, aiming at interdisciplinary connectivity, were begun early in the new millennium at the instigation of Art and Humanities Editor Gloria Kury, who conceived of the series and selected their advisory boards. These are Refiguring Modernism: Arts, Literatures, Sciences and Buildings, Landscapes, Societies.
Regional Publishing
Peter Potter, who came to the Press in 1990 from Wesleyan University Press where he was Acting Director, was instrumental in expanding the range, depth, and quality of the editorial program in the humanities and social sciences, especially in American and European history and in medieval studies. Potter, who became Editor-in-Chief in 1999 and then Associate Director in 2005, also took charge of the Press’s regional publishing program in the early 1990s with a mandate to increase its role as part of the University’s overall outreach efforts and as a major generator of sales revenue for the Press. For the first time a separate editorial advisory committee was created in 1998 to help the Press identify and evaluate worthy regional projects. This committee, with its authority delegated from the Press’s main faculty Editorial Committee, drew its members from inside and outside Penn State. Over the years the committee has had members who came from the Centre Daily Times, local bookstores including the Penn State Bookstore, the University Libraries, Penn State Public Broadcasting, and the Penn State English and History departments.
Perhaps the culminating achievement of the regional publishing program came in 2002 with the publication of Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth edited by Randall Miller and William Pencak. The first comprehensive history of the state in over thirty years, Pennsylvania was co-published by the Press and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission thanks in large part to generous funding from a unique source: sales of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s railroad heritage license plate.
Another noteworthy project, developed in cooperation with the Department of Geography at Penn State, was A Geography of Pennsylvania (1994) edited by Willard Miller. Other cooperative projects focused on Pennsylvania have brought the Press into fruitful working relationships with the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia, the Max Kade German-American Research Institute at Penn State, the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and the Pennsylvania German Society. For the PHA the Press took over publishing its official journal, Pennsylvania History, in 2003.
Besides books in the Keystone series, the Press has also contributed to the record of Penn State’s own history, with such books as Penn State: An Illustrated History (1985) by Michael Bezilla, histories of the College of Agriculture (1987) by Michael Bezilla and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (1992) by Willard Miller, and histories of The Nittany Lion (1997) by Jackie Esposito and Steven Herb and The Penn State Blue Band (1999) by Tom Range and Sean Smith. Most recently the Press has published We Are a Strong, Articulate Voice: A History of Women at Penn State (2006) written by Carol Sonenklar and sponsored by the Penn State Commission on Women and This Is Penn State: A Insider’s Guide to the University Park Campus (2006) by the staff of the Press with contributions by Lee Stout, Gabriel Welsch, and Craig Zabel.
Distribution and Co-Publication
Over the years the Press has distributed books for a variety of other institutions. Although this type of arrangement has a long history at the Press, it has become notably more visible and important in the past decade as the Press has sought ways to enhance revenues and achieve a more even cash flow without increasing the burden on the production staff. Among the institutions the Press has worked with cooperatively in this manner as distribution agent are the Baltimore Museum of Art, Chester County Historical Society, Index of Christian Art at Princeton University, James Michener Art Museum, Lancaster County Historical Society, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, Wexner Center for the Arts, and not least Penn State’s own Palmer Museum of Art for which the Press has served as distributor for some titles and co-publisher of others.
Co-publication has helped the Press significantly at various stages of its development. In the early 1990s it was the Press’s excellent working relationship with Polity Press especially and a few other British commercial academic publishers like Harvester Wheatsheaf and Macmillan that allowed rapid growth of a distinguished list in fields like European history, feminist studies, and political philosophy, which helped the Press establish its credentials as a leading player with authors like Peter Burke, Alex Callinicos, Terrell Carver, Anne Phillips, and Judy Wajcman. Some of the Press’s best-selling titles have been co-publications with Polity Press, among them New Perspectives on Historical Writing (1992; 2nd edn. 2001) edited by Peter Burke and Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (1991) edited by Mary Lyndon Shaney and Carole Pateman. Co-publications have aided the development of the Press’s list also in medieval studies (especially with the Magic in History series edited by Richard Kieckhefer and originally co-published with now defunct Sutton Publishing) and in art history (most recently with Gaillimard, Manchester University Press, Natural History Museum of London, and the Tate Modern).
Journals
In 1991 Thatcher began an important effort aimed at bringing the Press’s journal publishing program more into alignment with its book program. First he created a full-fledged Journals Department with Susan Lewis as Journals Manager. Then a few key moves were made in the Press’s journals portfolio. General Linguistics was dropped while two already existing journals were added: Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and Resources for American Literary Study. Both of these proved to be short-lived experiments, however, as the Press experienced increasing difficulty in publishing in the field of literary criticism generally and decided to cut back its presence in the discipline, both in books and journals, in the mid to late 1990s. In their place the Press sought to add journals in fields where the Press was more active in book publishing and looked especially for ones that had institutional support behind them, either as membership-based or as institutionally subsidized.
These negotiations brought three more journals to the Press: Book History, begun in 1998 as the official annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP); Journal of Nietzsche Studies, published by the Press starting in 2000 for the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain; and The Good Society, brought on board in 2001 as the Press expanded its connection from a book series to this triannual journal with the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society led by Stephen Elkin at the University of Maryland.
Meanwhile, in 2000 the Press with MaryLou McMurtrie now as Journals Manager entered into what is undoubtedly the most crucial arrangement of all for the survival and long-term financial viability of the journals operation, namely, participation in Project Muse. This is the cooperative online enterprise of nonprofit journal publishers that had been launched at The Johns Hopkins University as a joint undertaking of the press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library there (with Susan Lewis, former Penn State Journals Manager, as co-developer) in 1995 with support from the NEH and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Project Muse in its first five years concentrated on the forty journals that the Hopkins Press itself then published, but in 2000 opened itself up to other nonprofit publishers including university presses. Penn State was the very first press to sign a letter of intent to become a Muse member. In only a few years journal publishing has evolved from being primarily print-based to being principally online, with the bulk of subscription income “tipping” in the latter direction. Thanks to Project Muse, the Press has been able to make that transition painlessly and profitably, with ten of eleven Press journals now available through Muse to its 1,200 institutional subscribers in the U.S. and many foreign countries as part of its overall database of 330 journals from 70 nonprofit publishers, the largest such online collection in existence in the humanities and social sciences. More recently, in 2003 with the retirement of the journals circulation manager, the Press entered into an additional arrangement with the Hopkins Press to handle subscription fulfillment for the print edition of these journals as well and for single title electronic journal subscriptions outside of the Muse database.
Awards for Design and Scholarship
The Press has always taken special pride in the design and production of its books and journals—no doubt a reflection of its having been a leading publisher in art history almost from the start—and its record of success in achieving and maintaining high standards amidst ever tighter budget constraints has been exceptional. First under the guidance of Janet Dietz as Production Manager from 1963 to 1999 and since then as directed by her successor Jennifer Norton, the Production Department of the Press, with such long-time staff as Cherene Holland as Managing Editor and Steve Kress as Chief Designer, have created an international reputation for excellence that has been recognized with awards in annual competitions run by the Association of American University Presses and other organizations and that has served both to satisfy authors of Press books and to attract more to submit manuscripts.
Awards have been plentiful for the content of the Press’s books and journals as well as for their appearance. Especially since 1990 the Press has assiduously pursued recognition for the outstanding scholarship embodied in its publications and, as a result, Press titles have been honored with over eighty prizes from many scholarly associations and other organizations, including the American Academy of Religion, American Historical Association, American Political Science Association, American Sociological Association, College Art Association, and the Modern Language Association. A number of Press books have even won multiple awards, three going to each of the following titles, for example: Devin DeWeese’s Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (1994), John Markoff’s The Abolition of Feudalism (1996), David Burr’s The Spiritual Franciscans (2002), and Linda Faye Williams’s The Constraint of Race (2004).
Internship Programs
A less widely known contribution that the Press makes to the publishing industry and to Penn State undergraduate education takes the form of the internship and work-study programs for students that the Press has run for many years. One of these long in existence, which is jointly sponsored by the Press and the English Department, gives course credit to the student who serves as an intern for the Production Department every year. More recently, the Press arranged with the newly formed School of Information Sciences and Technology to create an internship for a student to work under the direction of the Press’s Information Systems Manager, and the Press and Libraries have joined the School of Communication in establishing the Bednar Internship for a student working for the new Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing.
Another internship, started in the mid-1990s at the initiative of then Assistant Marketing Manager Alison Reeves, who recognized the woeful underrepresentation of employees from minority group backgrounds in publishing, was partially funded for a number of years by Penn State’s Equal Opportunity Planning Committee as the Press made special efforts to attract candidates from these backgrounds. This internship was aimed at providing the student with exposure to the full range of Press departmental activities while offering the chance to concentrate in one area, like Editorial Acquisitions or Marketing. It became a model for other university presses to follow as Reeves brought this experience to the attention of the newly formed Diversity Committee of the Association of American University Presses on which she served.
Other students have come to work in various departments of the Press over the years under work-study or regular wage-payroll arrangements, gaining valuable on-the-job training while earning some extra money. Quite a few of these students have gone on to successful careers in the publishing industry, in both commercial and nonprofit sectors, and a few of them have become employees of the Press. In fact, in the late 1990s the Press instituted a new position of editorial assistant, and ever since the editorial assistants have been hired from the ranks of former interns.
Challenges and Changes Since the 1990s
The publishing industry has faced monumental challenges over the past couple of decades, which some observers have compared in their transformative magnitude to the early Gutenberg revolution. As part of the industry, the Press has been compelled to adapt and change as each new challenge has arisen: computerization of everything from book design and copyediting to marketing and order fulfillment over the course of the 1990s; the growth of chain “superstores” and the accompanying consolidation of the wholesale business, together with the decline and closure of many independently owned bookstores, since the mid-1990s; the steady erosion of the library market for scholarly monographs as libraries were pressured to spend more of their budgets on increasingly costly scientific, medical, and technical (STM) journals and on new electronic resources; the effects of coursepacks and, more recently, e-reserve and course management systems in reducing paperback sales; and of course the advent of the Internet and its massive impact on the way educational materials are accessed, marketed, bought, and sold as well as pirated.
Another important development has been the move from offset to digital printing, which ironically has made print-on-demand (POD) and short-run digital printing (SRDP) economically feasible, thereby giving a new lease on life to books that used to go out of print forever and now can continue to be available in print indefinitely. This is contrary to the prognostications of those “visionaries” of the mid-1990s who were quick to predict the demise of the printed book in favor of the e-book.
All of these changes, and more, have made it necessary for the Press staff to be ever alert and ready to make appropriate adjustments in methods of doing business. For instance, in the spring of 1998 the Press opened a new warehouse adjacent to the Press offices to accommodate what was then expected to be a growing need for more physical space to house the increasing inventory of Press books However, a reexamination of the need for space in light of advances in the quality and deployment of digital printing technology ultimately led to the decision to the consolidate the Press’s two warehouses into the newer one as POD and SRDP options enabled the Press to convert a large portion of its backlist to digital form.
This shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s was preceded by a major advance in the technology used for processing orders and maintaining sales records in the early 1990s as the Press adopted the Cat’s Pajamas order-fulfillment software system that was especially designed for use by smaller publishing companies. Business Manager Clifford Way, Jr., had to keep the Press’s warehouse and order-fulfillment operations working smoothly through these dramatic changes, which continue today with the demands of more customers for EDI fulfillment, for example.
Information Systems Manager Ed Spicer, meanwhile, has been working on a major overhaul of the main Press-wide database to accommodate all the changes in procedures and requirements (such as those reflecting threats of personal identity theft) that have come about since the Press first adopted FileMakerPro as its preferred software platform in the mid-1990s. He has simultaneously been engaged in redesigning the Press’s web site in anticipation of hosting it in house and developing enhanced e-commerce capabilities for it. And Sales and Marketing Director Tony Sanfilippo has taken on responsibility for all of the electronic licensing of Press books through netLibrary, Questia, etc. and, with Thatcher, has tackled the complicated business of dealing with Google in its various initiatives, which have proven both exciting and frustrating for publishers generally.
While these developments in the electronic environment of the Press have been challenging enough, the acquisitions staff has recognized the need to increase its efforts at finding more subsidies to support publication of individual books and series in print, from both foundations and authors’ own institutions. A particularly noteworthy success came in 2005 with the award of $162,000 from the Getty Foundation to help subsidize the costs of publishing thirteen titles in the Refiguring Modernism series, which Gloria Kury was instrumental in securing.
Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing
A development of potentially far-reaching significance for the Press was the establishment in the spring of 2005 of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP) as a joint venture of the Press and the University Libraries, under the co-directorship of the Press’s Peter Potter and the Libraries’ Bonnie MacEwan. This was the culmination of many years of cooperation between the Press and the Libraries, which has long had a representative of the Faculty Senate Committee on the Libraries sitting on the Press’s Editorial Committee. As the revolution in digital technology advanced in the late 1990s, the Press and the Libraries discussed more ways in which their relationship might become mutually beneficial. They learned a great deal about how to handle electronic projects from publication of two books by the Press, Times of Sorrow and Hope: Documenting Everyday Life in Pennsylvania During the Great Depression (2003) and TMI 25 Years Later: The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Accident and Its Impact (2004), which featured accompanying web sites managed by the Libraries. Both the Press and the Libraries also became partners with Cornell University in a project funded by the Mellon Foundation to develop a software program named DPubs from its original use in Project Euclid as a publishing platform for journals in statistics and mathemetics into a more general utility for publishing scholarly journals of all kinds, then conference proceedings, and eventually even monographs. Two more long-term projects, to digitize books from the Beaver Collection of the Libraries focusing on Pennsylvania (under a new imprint called Metalmark Books) and to resuscitate the Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures as a more broader-gauged series in Romance Studies, both in “open access” electronic form with an option for ordering a POD print version, suggested the need for a more formal and enduring structure for collaboration, and hence the ODSP was born. With the departure first of Bonnie MacEwan (to become library director at Auburn University) and then Peter Potter (to become editor-in-chief at Cornell University Press), the ODSP lost some of its early momentum, but is nevertheless forging ahead with a variety of projects while searches for new co-directors are under way.
The Future of the Press
What the future holds in store for the Press, and for scholarly publishing generally, is anyone’s guess. Thanks to President Graham Spanier, Provost Rodney Erickson, and Vice President for Research Eva Pell, the Press’s operating subsidy was restored beginning in fiscal year 2005. Even more recently, its administrative reporting line was changed from the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School to the Dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications as of December 1, 2005. Thus the Press is at least positioned well organizationally for the next stage of its evolution, which will undoubtedly see more overlapping among the functions of the Libraries, the Press, and the academic computing division of the University as digital forms of disseminating knowledge expand further. This development was predicted in the early 1990s by then Vice President for Research David Shirley, who was a special benefactor of the Press in allocating funds for its new warehouse before his departure for the University of California at Berkeley.
In the near term we may expect to see more experiments in “open access” scholarly publishing, both in journals where the Press is working with Project Muse to implement partial open access and in the various projects of the ODSP. As Dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications Nancy Eaton well knows, the Press has a mission to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible in the cheapest way possible, but also exists under a mandate to generate revenues sufficient to cover 90% of its operating costs. The challenge ahead, as it has always been, is to devise the kind of business models that will balance those competing demands in a manner that best fulfills the twin goals of maximum distribution at minimal expense that defines the Press’s purpose of public service.