University presses were established to distribute books and journals where the commercial interest was not deemed strong enough. Oxford University first published in 1478 and the US Cambridge Press in 1640. Givler (2002) says the motivation for founding modern university presses was that ‘to leave the publication of scholarly, highly specialized research to the workings of a commercial marketplace would be, in effect, to condemn it to languish unseen.’ There was a regular growth in presses, with one a year opening from 1920 to 1970 (Givler, 2002). The university press survived well to the beginning of the 21st century, when increased competition from commercial publishers impacted their viability. This competition was driven partly by significant hedge fund investment making it difficult for university presses, with limited funds, to compete. They were caught in a pincer movement of decreasing financial support from universities dealing with the financial crisis and increased competition from commercial publishers for their business (Greco and Wharton 2010).
One of the problems with the finances was that printing and distributing paper journals was an alien business for universities to be in. It involved equipment and logistics which were costly to maintain and seemed increasingly detached from the everyday business of the university. But the almost wholesale shift to online journals and print-on-demand (POD) books has now seen a realignment with university skills and functions. Universities do run websites, and they are the places people look to for information. The experience the higher education sector has built up through OERs (the subject of the next chapter), software development and website maintenance now aligns beneficially with the skills they’ve always had of editing, reviewing, writing and managing journals. So now could be the time for the
