- Association of University Presses (AUPresses) are Drinks Reception Sponsor at University Press REDUX Conference 2025
Having both previously been members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) Annual Meeting Program Committee, we were delighted when AUPresses President Anthony Cond (Liverpool University Press) asked if we would like to co-chair this year’s committee. Our first goal was to assemble a committee that represents the full spectrum of university press functions, ensuring a balanced and inclusive program that reflects the diversity of voices within our community.
The AUPresses Annual Meeting has long been an important (and enjoyable!) forum for university press professionals, scholars, and industry leaders to engage in critical discussions, share best practices, explore emerging opportunities, and more. This year marks the fourth time the meeting will be conducted virtually, an approach that our Program Committee believes offers unique advantages in terms of accessibility and engagement.
A virtual meeting provides a great opportunity for wider staff engagement as many university press budgets are limited or restrictive, meaning only a select few from each organization are likely able to attend in-person meetings. This is particularly true of members of our community outside of North America as the Annual Meeting has traditionally been held in the United States or Canada. Additionally, most of this year’s sessions will be recorded, meaning that an even larger group of registrants will have access to this year’s programming.
The absence of travel or lodging expenses associated with in-person meetings provided our session organizers more opportunity to secure moderators and speakers for their sessions who otherwise may not have been able to participate in person.
Those of us in the university press community regularly work and engage with people and organizations outside our own presses such as authors and editors, freelancers and vendors, societies and publishing partners, among others. As a committee we feel these voices are important to incorporate into Annual Meetings whenever possible but it can be difficult to convince someone to travel to an AUPresses meeting to serve on a single panel. There are, of course, various ways to overcome these challenges for in-person meetings but a virtual meeting format makes it much easier to involve these individuals and organizations.
As a committee, we emphasized these benefits in our initial call for proposals and our work with each session planner. The result is a 2025 AUPresses Virtual Annual Meeting Program that is rich with a diversity of participants. In addition to the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, we are pleased to welcome moderators and speakers from around the world, including China, Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and Tanzania. We were also pleased to see panels come together that include representatives from both large and small presses, vendors, and sessions that were intentional about representing both books and journals.
Panels will discuss the big and small transitions within academic publishing. From addressing changes in printing strategies--whether print-to-digital or born-digital and Open Access (OA)--to considering trends in journal publishing, this Annual Meeting seeks to index how decisions of any size impact all constituents. Given that change is not just felt by one sector of the scholarly ecosystem, the Annual Meeting emphasizes the collaborations between presses and libraries, library publishers, independent bookstores, historically Black university and colleges (HBCUs), the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC), and Adventures in Digital Publishing groups, among many others. As all the final details fall into place, we believe this year’s program pursues intelligent, intentional, and international publishing, blending sessions that confront big-picture challenges with panels that dive into the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day.
In these times of chaos and uncertainty, when so many core democratic and humanitarian values are under direct threat, the Program Committee reaffirms AUPresses’s commitments to inclusivity and collaboration, the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and the freedom of expression. We hope that this year’s program will demonstrate that AUPresses stands with its members, partners, and others to reaffirm the value and complexity of this shared scholarly work and also will affirm that our organization seeks to innovate and grow, to find meaningful change in good times and, perhaps even more importantly, in bad times.
As co-chairs we are so grateful to the members of our committee for volunteering their time and expertise. And we are thankful for the incredible enthusiasm and support of the AUPresses community in proposing sessions and volunteering to serve as chairs and speakers. We hope that you will find these sessions inspiring and insightful, and we look forward to seeing you online June 9th through June 12th!
About Association of University Presses
The Association of University Presses represents a global community of more than 160 nonprofit publishers whose shared mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. AUPresses members are active across many scholarly disciplines in the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing. The Association holds intellectual freedom, integrity, stewardship, and equity and inclusion as core values.About the Authors
David Famiano is Journals Director at the University of California Press.
Ana Maria Jimenez-Moreno is an Acquisitions Editor at The Ohio State University Press.
