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Small, but Mighty: Maintaining and Elevating the Value of Humanities Content through Strategic Partnerships
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Small, but Mighty: Maintaining and Elevating the Value of Humanities Content through Strategic Partnerships
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Segment:0 .
Thank you for coming. I know we're up against shark guy thank you for spending time with us here in the humanities room. When we talk about small, I want you to understand quite just how small Carnegie Mellon University press is. We have one full time employee. It's not me.
This is officially 10% of my time. And let me tell you, it's a lot more than that. And then we have a ragtag collection of lots of people that I'll talk about in our collaborations and partnerships question that really help us get the job done. So traditionally, Carnegie Mellon University press has been mostly a poetry press. It's been going on for 50 odd years. It's published, first press to publish Rita Dove.
We've got some Pulitzer Prize winners in there. It was a bit of an idiosyncratic press in that it was run by a poet in our English department, who generated a reputation for publishing excellent poetry, but didn't necessarily believe in any of the processes of publishing. So you can imagine trying to find a contract in all of this. So, but he did a really good job of publishing poetry.
It's just that he tended to publish people that looked like him and were his friends, I would say. And so when the press became part of the libraries about a year ago now, we really sat down and thought about what we wanted the mission of this to be like while we were still trying to uphold this reputation for poetry. What What is our responsibility at this time as humanities publishers, and particularly as one of Carnegie Mellon, were already.
The humanities are kind of like fighting off I left right and center right. So we brought on a poetry editor, a drama editor, because drama is one of the big strengths of the University and a fiction editor. We just had our first content contest for publishing new plays and publishing literary translations. We're really, really focused on how inclusion is in the doing, not in the saying.
So trying to think about fresh new voices who were publishing, who were trying to open up opportunities to. And then on the other side, we're starting an academic imprint. What a time to be starting an imprint of anything, right. That brings the humanities into conversation with other disciplines around some of the big issues. So I'm not going to go down a monograph route here because it just doesn't work for us and for the kind of press we are.
But those humanities voices need to be in the conversations again, particularly in a place like Carnegie Mellon, when we are engaging and presenting ourselves to the world. All right, so the American Historical Association is the largest Historical Association in the world. And we published the flagship journal in the historical discipline. We publish a magazine.
But right now, much of our attention has been shifted to advocacy, which is mostly outside of my realm as our publishing person. But that's really where we're spending a lot of time. And part of that includes training historians to do this work. And so this really dovetails with what Doctor Shipman talked about last night with science communication.
We have the same needs in the humanities. We need historians. We need literature scholars. We need specialists to go out and say what they are saying about the Civil War or immigration or genocide is wrong. And I think that's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of values, which keeps being discussed this week, is that so much of the conversation has been about the value of science, which is very valuable, but also a lot of our values as a society come out of the humanities.
And so thinking about how to shore up those values of pushing back against white supremacy and all of the Dea removals, I'll say. So one of the things that I think about right now with our publishing program is making sure that we have diverse authors in our magazine. That's something I can control. As someone who's doing a lot of commissioning versus our journal, which mostly is getting submissions over the transom.
But really, we're very focused right now on advocacy, both at the federal level and the state level, because for us also, history education is under attack at the k-12 level. So we're sending a lot of letters to state legislatures. We're releasing statements that President Trump is not reading about the Smithsonian, about the. Well, we haven't released one yet on the Garden of American heroes, but we'll see what happens with that.
And we're currently suing the federal government over the NIH grants and the dissolution of the NIH staff. So while that's not publishing, I feel like it's all very tied up together of what are the values of our society and how do we shore them up for our larger American society. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming out.
I represent a really small University Press, University of Virginia Press. We are a tier 2 press, meaning that our revenue does not exceed $3 million. We have about 60 to 80 books a year that we bring out. We have a back catalog of about 1,200 books and in a typical calendar year, we might sell about 60,000 books. So if you think about the larger ecosystem, we're really tiny.
I always have in mind that 3 million ISBNs are assigned in the United States to books each year. Granted, 2 million of those are self-published books, but still, if you think there's a million left over and we have 60 to 80 a year, that's really tiny. But I still think we're mighty because we as part of the larger University Press ecosystem, we're really mission driven, and we're committed to peer reviewed scholarship that is the best excellent research validated.
And I think that's where University presses really make a difference to that validation. When I got this question, it was a good thing. We had just gone through a strategic plan meeting last year at the University of Virginia Press, and our strategic plan tagline kind of says it all. And that is mission driven success in a data driven age. And this is really how we're trying to meet the moment, is by making really smart publishing decisions, by looking at data and analyzing, where can we make an impact, where do books sell.
Which fields are maybe not wise to invest in, also by investing in New structures. So we just got a new database system, where we can both analyze our sales much more in a much more granular way, but also shore up our discoverability through better metadata. So that is the data side of things. But I really want to focus on the mission side of things. I always joke with my authors.
We put in non-profit. But I think that's really important because that means that the mission still prevails. And I was the head of the mission, vision, and values committee, which really brings out the German accent when I say that, and I'm pretty proud of what we came up with. So if I could just read the mission of the University of Virginia Press now is the University of Virginia Press is the scholarly publishing division of the University of Virginia.
We sustain the academic mission of the University by publishing collaborative scholarship of the highest quality, both in print and through our digital imprint, rotunda, that contributes to the growth of knowledge and understanding among readers in our Commonwealth and around the world. And there's a lot of key words in here that we're looking at collaboration, that we are committed to the highest quality and that we're committed to it both in print and digital.
So I think that's where University presses need to go and throw up both sides of the equation. And it's also important here that we have the Commonwealth of Virginia in there. So we serve our regional communities. And that's not just the academic community, that's the state of Virginia. And then also have the aspiration to contribute to knowledge throughout the world.
And then we came up with values and we were really cute about it. It reads out, read r-e-a-d, but they are also pretty important. We want to be responsive to evolving trends and practices. We want to be equitable in whom and how we publish. We want to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and we want to be diligent in curating a catalog of quality resources. So these are the kind of values we try to keep in mind with each and every acquisition, and how we treat each and every book.
And through that check system, we try to make the smartest publishing decision we can so that we publish highest quality books that find readerships and make a difference in the world. Thank you. Not working. Not working.
I'm passing around. It's totally fine. Thank you very much. Small, but mighty right. That's the theme. So let's move on to our second question. So partnerships, especially for University presses and non-profit publishers who don't have very many resources, are vital for daily tasks.
Opportunities for collaboration, better discovery of content, and many more positive reasons in my organization, for example, Project MUSE business model is all about building, leveraging, and fostering our partnerships with libraries, publishers, funders, organizations, and vendors. And they strengthen our product. And frankly, we would not be successful without them. So my question to the panel is what are the strategic partnerships, collaborations or creative relationships you are seeking or currently involved in and how do they help to grow and sustain your programs.
So I brought a few examples we have in the past 10 years or so, done a couple of different grant funded projects that resulted in publications. So we were working across the association with our teaching and learning team, with our professional affairs staff to produce products at the end of these grants or as part of these grants. So one that is a bestseller for us is careers for history majors, which was funded by the Lumina Foundation.
And so this is obviously quite small. It's got a lot of images and graphic design to it. But Lumina helped us to put this out at a time where we are constantly hearing, OK, I like history, but my mom wants me to major in engineering or go to law school. So what do I even do with a history degree other than law school. And so this was an opportunity to show a lot of different career paths and not just teaching in academia.
And we are working on a second edition of this right now, which I'm hoping will be out in print by September. Pending a lot of author work still. So all of you know how that may go. But this has, as I said, has been a bestseller. It came out in 2018. We have ended up with the great opportunity to a lot of departments, history departments and universities will buy this in bulk and then hand it out to advisees, which has been a really fantastic way to get that message out there.
And like I said, it's been successful enough. We're doing a second edition, so hopefully, that will also be a good seller. The other one is actually for faculty. We had a program with the Gardner Institute for, oh shoot, I'm going to get the name wrong, but the Gardner Institute for undergraduate education, I think. And that was a program called history gateways, where they were working on improving introductory history courses throughout the nation to better serve particularly underrepresented students.
The students who are most likely to. Leave that course with an F D, or an incomplete. And we came out of that with another small booklet which has a much less catchy title, designing introductory courses for student success, and this includes case studies and teaching reflections from some of the faculty members who are involved in that project. So working with the Gardner Institute on that was really valuable because they kind of formulated this Gateway's idea, and we're applying it across different disciplines.
And the case studies and teaching reflections was a format that they had found successful previously. So this came out last year at the end of that project, and we're about to do a second printing actually, which I was surprised. I didn't think it would be a big seller, and it wasn't a big printing, but still. So those kinds of building in your publications program with those kinds of grant funded projects and being able to report out to our stakeholders, in our case, our members and other historians who are teaching or all of those students we want to major in.
History has been a really great opportunity to share the things we've learned from those funding programs and not have them just kind of end, and then we move on to the next grant project. For us, I think for the literary side of the press. So the one that's been around for the longest students are absolutely our secret sauce. It's our biggest collaboration and our most rewarding one.
So every year, the English department at Carnegie Mellon runs a writing and publishing course. In the fall and in the spring and in the fall, the students basically are going through with their mentor the slush pile, and learning how to read a manuscript and how to assess it, because we were doing this mission shift a little bit into trying to think about new and fresh voices. It was really, really helpful to have actually the students be like, what.
What attracts you to this. What do you think your teachers would want. But like what is drawing you to this. And that was really, really exciting. And, I checked in with the editors this week and was learned how is this going. And they said, I have so much respect for these young people. They have really strong ideas. They really can take out what is speaking to them.
And then obviously we have a lot of quality controls around that and experienced editors. But this was really, really helpful. So the English department been doing that for a long time. The drama department just started doing it with their dramaturgy program. And then in the spring, the students start helping with marketing. They create pitch decks for the editorial board meeting where they talk about the audience and the author and why this person is exciting.
They are interviewing authors right now so that when we have a website relaunch in the fall, we're going to have content that will be interesting and compelling. They're advising us on book talk, social media strategy and all of this kind of thing. So they are really, really, really fantastic. And, next year. Some of the stuff we want to do is leverage that relationship with the School of Drama to think about, what.
What does it mean for these students, many of whom will end up being on Broadway to narrate audiobooks for us. And how can we begin to really tap into that kind of thing. The other places, I would say so. I know that when presses get moved under libraries, it's not always the most popular thing. But for a press that had two employees and one quit and now we only have one, we are able to leverage the marketing expertise, the accounting and billing expertise, legal assistance, branding, all of those sorts of things that come with a regular library.
And then especially with a library like ours, some of you probably our library. Dean Keith Webster, he used to work for Wiley, was publisher himself. We're basically the island of misfit toys. The provost just keeps giving us more bits to add on to the library. So it's like we're this one library with a sustainability initiative and a Botanical Institute.
And oh, look. So now we've got a press, and now we've got an entertainment Technology Center and an interdisciplinary minor program. And so they're all just like kludged together. But what helps with that is we're able to use some of those economies of scale to actually put out like 15 books a year, which is tiny. But like I said, one full time employee, a couple of other strategic partnerships, another one is actually the city of Pittsburgh and the literary scene that is really strong there.
And so our poetry editor is also the Director of the International Poetry festival. And so he has been really, really helpful in making connections with the bookstores, with the other, with the other publishers, and really trying to think about how we work in concert together. And then I'm going to teach a course for our grand challenges course for on readers and reading in the spring of 26.
And that's one of those courses that all the undergrads have to take one of them. And for me, that's an opportunity for students to learn about how presses shape what we read. And so we're going to be looking at all of these different factors there. I've got two more really quick examples and then I'll pass it on. One is we've been leveraging our architecture archives.
So this year's 125th anniversary of Carnegie Mellon. An architectural historian wanted to publish this architects journal and sketchbook and then a set of essays. And it's something we would never have been able to afford to do just on our own. But we have an architecture archive. The architecture librarian needed to spend down the endowment.
Yay we're able to put out this three volume beautiful book. And I'm really excited about it. And then finally, just the other really important partner I think for us is our faculty, who increasingly want to publish open teaching materials. Not necessarily not textbooks per se, but things that could be used in the classroom. And we can offer them the imprimatur of a University Press.
We can offer them peer review. We can offer them, impact metrics, things like that. And so that's a really interesting collaboration that's starting to take shape as we move forward. So UVA press used to be called the University Press of Virginia, and then we changed it to UVA press very strategically. But 20 years ago, because we want to be closer linked to our parent institution, UVA.
So what we've been doing recently is make that relationship even more close knit. So we've been focusing on demonstrating our value to the University and also becoming known across the University. We do not print the student catalog. We actually print high quality, award winning books. But we collaborate with UVA and try to better integrate and leverage relationships across the campus in two ways.
One is also through students. So we've recently begun working with fhd+ which is a UVA initiative to train graduate students in careers beyond the Academy. So we've been bringing in fhd+ interns that work in the editorial department, some in the marketing department, and some with me in acquisitions to train them for possible publishing careers. And then that makes us a little bit more visible across campus.
And then the other one is actually through strategic book series. So UVA has amazing research centers. And to be more closely linked to them, we have established book series very strategically with some of those units. So on my list I have the Miller center for Public Affairs and that's basically presidential studies help me in this environment, but that's where I think our books have the highest impact, because we've been able to attract practitioners to publish through UVA press.
And then those books can maybe speak back to what's happening and provide correctives. The best example for that is last year we published the Inspector General for the DOD and the DOJ, who had been in those various agencies for 20 years, and he was really trying to demonstrate the value of government oversight to maybe make an impact during the election. He failed, but I think the book is still an important one, and we wouldn't have been able to publish this book without the strategic partnership with the Miller center.
Another one is the Karsh Institute for democracy that's looking at democracy and from a global perspective. And my tagline for this series may be very cynically, is saving democracy one book at a time, two years too late. But it means we're trying and we're again trying to reach beyond the Academy to practitioners and help publish books that might make a difference on a wider scale.
And we also have a collaboration with the Carter g. Woodson Institute, and those books are going to be ever more important in this changing climate. And what's really interesting about these partnerships, they don't just make us more visible to the University and help us attract high caliber authors. They are also a financial partnership. And so what all these book series have in common, they are underwritten by the units that sponsor them.
So in we have series editor agreements that are very standard. We compensate our series editors for bringing good authors to us, but the units themselves also underwrite some production costs, which is really important now that the price of paper has gone up by up to 35% So we get a small amount, usually 2000 to $3,000 per book. But it really makes a difference in how we can price these books. Again, we are not trying to get rich here, but it helps us offset some losses and price these books affordably to maybe reach a wider audience.
So those are the relationships I want to highlight with UVA, and also for the print side of things and on the digital side of things, I think we've had really great success partnering with big foundations to start certain programs. So the Mellon Foundation back in 2002 gave us startup grants to start our digital imprint, rotunda. And then we also partnered with the National Archives on founders online.
And that's been really successful. There's been almost a million page views of our founders online per year. And then we also partnered with the Society for architectural historians on something called archipedia, which is what it sounds like. It's a Wikipedia, but for buildings, and it's really well curated and it's an open access resource, and we only have the ability to make it open access because of the partnership with SRH.
So those are just some that's a quick glimpse of all the different partnerships we have that help us create high quality content and then make some of it open access. And on the last part, I also want to highlight some of our partners, like the Miller center of fundraising right now, to maybe create endowments so that especially on the digital side of things, the endowment would generate enough money for maintenance on the back end to make some of the content of rotunda open access in perpetuity.
So they're looking at doing that for the presidential recordings that are in rotunda. So that's maybe an interesting way of going forward where we can still get the money we need to maintain the technology and keep up with technology, but we can make it an open access resource to benefit the widest readership possible. Thank you very much. So I'm going to go off our little script a little bit because I want to have a follow up question.
So I'm listening to all of these amazing collaborations. They all sound incredibly positive and really adding value to all of your publishing programs. So I'm wondering if you have any sort of tips or just advice for how to approach these partnerships, how to find and seek them out. And if you have ever encountered any challenges within the partnerships and how you might navigate that. I'm putting the panelists on the spot a little bit with this question.
I mean, I can just speak for what I did. I started at UVA in 2019. I just tried to network as much as I possibly could and email people like, hey, do you want to have a meeting. And can we talk. And some of these partnerships were just cold calls. And they generated really good outcomes. And it's also nice to have a blueprint actually.
So I established the memorandum of understanding with the Miller center. And then I had a blueprint in hand to approach the Karsh Institute. And I said, this unit is giving us this much money per book. Would you do the same for book series on your end. So those are the kind of things. The challenges is this funding environment is really tough. We don't know what's coming.
The headwinds are really strong. So with SAA, for example, I know that we are renegotiating our agreement with them and they're pleading poverty and we're pleading poverty. So now we're trying to figure out what's a fair dollar amount to keep a resource like archipedia open access. So that's what's challenging. But I think if both partners are acting in good faith and we're very transparent with one another, I think that's the key.
And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't work out. And we also try to be mindful of resources. So it's not a one size fits all with these memorandum of understanding and the kind of money we get per book from different funding sources. I mean, funding is always the problem and only getting worse. So one partner as the representative of scholarly associations up here, one partner I didn't explicitly say is our members and other historians in the field.
And so serving the membership is one of the most important parts of the mission. And what's difficult about that at is, as I said, it's quite a large association. It covers all historians and all historians of all time times and places, geographies everywhere. Every methodology. So we're not the Society of military history or the Organization of American historians or the African Studies Association.
We're covering anything historical, right. And so being able to represent that membership and serve them in our publications can be tricky. Part of that is networking, right. So we do have more. It's in the United States. We have more historians of the United States as members than any other region. But we still have significant memberships to study Europe, Africa, Latin America, et cetera.
And some of that is like a personal challenge. I'm trained as a US historian. I know that historiography really well, and who's working in that field and who's published in it, and you have to do the legwork to be able to reach those other people and get those interesting articles and things like that. So I think that's one of other than funding that can be one of the biggest challenges is serving the membership, serving all of the membership at all career levels, and also not just academics.
That's been a real big push for us over the last, I'd say, 5 to 10 years of reaching out to k-12 teachers who many, especially in independent and private schools, have PhDs and ended up going into teaching and are part of our constituency and museums and archives and librarians and the National Park Service. All of these people our historians and part of our target audience.
So I would say that's one of the big challenges. I think so, advice wise. I mean, Carnegie Mellon, I think other places, is a place of relationships and networking and talking to people and finding out what gets them excited and then trying to align what gets you excited with what gets them excited.
The challenges for us are OK. So as we are part of a library, like I said earlier, it's really helpful because we get these bits of people, but we only get little bits of people. And so that's the challenge. Where maybe I'm third in line behind this website redesign. And this other logo problem, before I can get any of that attention. And so I've had to slow my roll a bit, which can be difficult and just be a little more patient.
I think you guys talked about funding being an issue. And I think for us it's less funding because we know we're not going to get any more people and that that's what the funding would go for. And it's more time. And the fact that I already had a full time job before this became part of my full time job and yeah. So for me, that's just the challenge is like we are very scrappy, I would say.
And it all feels a little bit bound together with goodwill. And we're just trying to make sure that we have sustainable, at least processes and well documented processes that undergird that will allow for some of the scrappiness. Thank you. I like the scrappiness. All right, let's move on to our final question.
So as we've been talking about a lot, it is a challenging time for the Humanities. But I do think there are glimmers of hope. Our research brief, published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2024, reported that HBCUs are awarding more humanities bachelor's degrees than they did 25 years ago. Humanities instructors are listening more closely to their students, embracing rather than fighting AI and writing courses and working on innovative ways to reshape their programs.
For example, Washington University at ST Louis actively recruits students for humanities majors and puts their Top Instructors in front of first years. And the results have shown that the number of English majors, rising steadily for seven years in nearly doubled since their 2018 low at Hofstra University. English majors take publishing courses which help to demonstrate the value of a humanities degree and a career path.
I'm a perfect example of that. So here's my question as we look to the future for University presses and non-profit publishing, what are your thoughts on humanities and social sciences scholarship and where will it go. How will it evolve, innovate, and more importantly, sustain its value. Who would like to start.
I think that's the million dollar question. Maybe literally. What we are thinking through at UVA press is both the print and the digital side, and there's two different answers for those formats. Let me start with the digital side. But actually let me start with the big problem for University presses, which is there was a Chronicle of higher education article in May of 2024, and the headline was is this the end of reading.
And then I think a lot of people saw the Atlantic article last November, which basically said, what was the title, the elite college students who can't read books. Well, there goes our audience. So University presses had to pivot in the late aughts to more diverse audiences. Until then, libraries were our best customers. And then starting in the 2010s, that diversified.
And we really bet on course adoptions before then, course adoption was a bonus, and then course adoption sort of became the bread and butter of University Press publishers, so that we were really looking to students as the core audience. And if a book is adopted in a course, you have 20 guaranteed sales and five courses. That is really, really good, especially for the backlist.
And if students don't read anymore, what do we do. And then maybe the answer is providing educational resources in more interactive digital formats. So we've also been trying that. And there's one of our partners in the audience, Alison Levy from Brown University digital publications. And we were really lucky to get the first born digital project out of Alison's shop called furnace and Fugue, which brought to life a early modern German alchemical book.
And it's a true born digital anthology. And it has music. It's beautifully done. It has transcriptions, translations of this old alchemical book. And we were amazed to see that as a print book, we would have maybe printed 750 copies of an edited volume, but this born digital publication had 70,000 engagements a few months after it was released.
So that was really revealing to us because we can use our same processes, have it peer reviewed, have it validated, make sure it's this high quality academic product and then reach a massive audience. And I know engagement is not the same as reading a book cover to cover, but it is revealing. And so we're going to be investigating more in collaboration with Brown University Digital publications and other entities like Brown.
If we can bring more born digital scholarship to audiences. And what helped us in that process is using our same validation strategies, having a peer reviewed, having it approved by our board of directors. And then translating that to these other formats. So we're actually looking into virtual reality now. So that's on the digital side.
On the print side, if the student market is breaking away. This is where the Commonwealth part of our mission statement serving the state of Virginia and its audience is really important, because we're pivoting to regional trade. And University presses have done that for ages, because the big trade presses don't serve regions as well as University presses can. But we've also haven't been sustained in that at Virginia.
But now we do. We have a new imprint called Ravana books, and that's histories and stories about the state of Virginia and its peoples for audiences in Virginia. And it's been really encouraging. I don't know if any of you saw the Mellon Foundation 2017 report on University Press, publishing and print runs and sales and the. It's the best data we still have about University Press book sales.
And the average monograph in five years sells 643 copies. And that's high. Actually, it's declined since then. Whereas with some of these regional books, our best seller is a book on grace Sherwood, the only witch to be convicted in the state of Virginia. And the book is called The witch of pongo, and it's sold over 3,000 copies, and it's not even been out a year.
So that's really encouraging to us. And it's also a platform so we can tell the stories of Black Virginians. We can tell the stories of LGBTQIA2S Virginians. So that's where we're putting our focus now on state books for these audiences while still doing the scholarly books will always be our bread and butter. But by pivoting to this regional imprint, we can also have an impact beyond the academic market.
OK OK. We are lucky in that almost every American knows what history is. So that's already a step ahead of many people and everyone's dad loves it. Or grandpa. Father's Day is coming up. The dad books are going to sell.
The Lincoln biographies, the World War two books. You all know what I'm talking about. So being able to harness that audience for serious history researchers, not Bill O'Reilly is I think, a challenge which Nadine is facing as well at UVA. And so I think a lot about that public engagement piece to come back to where I started. I have been running an op Ed workshop. This next annual meeting will be the fourth one for historians to learn how to write op eds and get their published publications and their research in front of the public.
And actually, one thing I thought was really fun is that our meeting was in New York in January, and I put together what we called a pitch slam, which I Stole from another association, where we had editors from major publications there, and attendees could sign up to pitch them in two minutes. So they got up in front of a microphone and said, hi, I'm Laura Ainslie, and I would like to write an article for time about sex education would have been mine.
So that was really great in that it gave people the opportunity to have face time with people who work at Time Magazine and the Smithsonian Magazine. We were supposed to have the Atlantic, but Johnny had to drop out, but Jelani Cobb chaired it for me, which was really wonderful. But finding those opportunities to meet the public where they are, like we've been talking about at many of these sessions, is so important.
And for history, especially when the humanities in general are so under attack. But our national story is really being interrogated and whitewashed and pushed up against. We're really kind of turning back the clock on some of the progress we've made. And so making sure that people know these statistics are being told about immigration is not true. And immigration hasn't been like that since x year and since these acts.
And there was a reason we liberalized immigration in 1965. Et cetera. I think that's a really important mission and something that I really want to in my role at the help our community to push forward, whether that's op eds, whether that's podcasts, wherever they can meet the public. I loved the idea last night of the bar night of like two scientists sit down at the bar.
I think humanity scholars should do that. Go out and say, hey, I'm an expert in James Baldwin, come talk to me or whatever. Like, that'd be so fun. So I really think there's an opportunity right now while we are in this era where the humanities are in such trouble to take these stories that we know so well and bring them to the public and help to shore up these values and the progress that's been made, though never linearly.
Wow OK. So no no no, that was great. That was great. 100% agree that basically students. People in graduate school need to be learning how to communicate their research. They need to be learning about how to create a persona and think about pitching to them.
All of that. Yes, also to the local, I think our very best selling book, which is probably under written several volumes of poetry, is Pittsburgh the Paris of Appalachia by a local, which I definitely saw an uptick during the whole JD Vance sofa fiasco that was going on in the fall. All right. But more seriously, it feels like given the current moment, I was going to swear, but I'm not.
It feels like more important than ever that the humanities are in dialogue, not just with the public but with other disciplines because the humanities and maybe I'm just someone with a French PhD at Carnegie Mellon, and I'm suffering like I'm like, all of these conversations are happening about AI, about data sovereignty. All of these kinds of things and the humanities bring or can introduce an epistemological diversity to those conversations.
That's really, really important. They can bring a global lens to the conversations that are happening and a critical one. And so that feels really important to me that we are, as publishers, thinking about putting people in conversation around topics that people care about. And then the other one is just this piece about the public. And not necessarily talking at the public, but talking with the public in a language that as if there was one public publics.
It feels to me. And then these last two points are a little bit much broader higher education things, but that I think really have a trickle down effect here. And one is that I feel like every humanities degree, needs to have a public humanities requirement. And that should be what we're focusing on. And I think we need a coin of the realm that isn't a scholarly monograph, that the thing that gets people tenure and promotion is not something where they lock themselves away for five years and then eventually it appears and then four years later, they're able to say, someone cited it.
And so it feels like there's a mixture of communication and audience and format and meeting people where they are. And if there is this crisis of reading, then what are the other ways that we can communicate this work. All of it. Yeah, I don't know. I'm done.
I think this is working. Oh, good. I think this is a great time to pause and take some questions from the audience. So I'm going to run this mic down. Any questions. Thoughts comments. All on people.
Listening I'm a oh Marcel with floss. How can people who are in the science publishing help with this since we're talking about strategic partnerships.
Some of you mentioned some of these are cold calls and some of them aren't. How can we as scientific publishing people help with getting your work out there and seen by more people who need it. Science and humanities collaboration. I'll make a pitch for a history of science column in your journal that talks about the history, the cultural history of certain argument that's being made by a piece.
That could be cool. Yeah, that was exactly where I was going to go. I used to run a blog on. I was managing editor of the blog nursing Cleo, which is a history of the intersections of gender and health medicine. We have a book coming out this fall with Rutgers press. I hope everyone checks it out. Thank you.
But I think that all of science has humanities aspects to it, whether it's the history aspect, like right now, we need people to understand why vaccines exist and see those charts of the measles vaccine was introduced and then the measles deaths went down. But there's also other humanities aspects. Like there's literary aspects. There's the I think in the Dea realm, this is really important to recognize why groups have been underrepresented or not included at different times.
So I love this idea of a history column, but have a historian do it. There are a lot of historians of medicine who are MDs, and they don't do great history all the time. So partner with experts in those fields that you're interested in working with because each discipline has its own methodologies and methods of writing and research. And we can help each other out with those things and maybe building on that, if you do joint issues with the humanities journal, that could be really fruitful and also invite humanities scholars to submit articles and there's a journal for everything.
So if the American Chemical Society wants to partner with the Journal of the history of chemistry, you could do that. I would say, too, that the other thing is that literature scholars who often don't get necessarily thought about in this are really, really good at close reading. That is what they spent years learning how to do and then connecting those to other pieces. I mean, they're the OG evidence synthesis.
And so thinking about how those kind of skills could be useful, could be brought into conversation with some of this content. And particularly with some of the almost word again, that's coming out of the government. And so yeah. Thank you. Hi OK, great.
It's working. I'm Catherine, I'm with the American Sociological Association. My question is also about partnerships, and specifically when you're looking for partners, especially with these smaller presses and society publishers being so mission driven, that being such an integral part of what we do, how do you go about making sure that the partnerships and the foundations and those you're looking to work with are going to be aligned with your values and your publishing mission.
And then the second part of my question is just practically, when you are reaching out to them, what sort of strategic choices or what do you find. Do they tend to find compelling in terms of why they should work with you. Those are two really interesting questions, I think. The first one is when we commission a series, it has to be peer reviewed, just like a book would.
And so we send out a series, book series proposal and the would be editors CVS. And then it's peer reviewed and it has to go through the board approval process. So they're really put to the test as to their bona fides. And the peer review does change things actually. Maybe recommending a different editor is added or the focus of the series should change. So that's one way we quality control.
And then in terms of how to make ourselves look like a good partner to different entities, I usually go with it's good for your donors route, actually. And so I know a lot of the entities with whom we partner, they then use, they get a certain number of those books that are published through these collaborations as free copies to give to their donors. And so that's a value added, beautifully presented book.
And then they also can feel good about themselves that they're increasing knowledge in the world. So that's been proven successful to me. I want to dig into your question about values and values alignment, because it's something I've been thinking about this whole meeting because lots of us have been throwing around of scholarly publishing values or we share, I don't know that anyone's actually sat down and said, what do you mean when you use this word.
And for humanities people. So I'm part of a group called mattress sutures, and we've been doing these values workshops with humanities scholars. And I tell you, there's nothing like a group of 20 humanities scholars arguing over the meaning of a word for three hours. All right. And so when we talk about values, I think we need to be really careful that we have built consensus with the people we are claiming shared values with.
And then that we've said, OK, if these are the words that describe, what does that look like in practice if we value equity, what does that mean when it comes to recognition of peer reviewers or payment or any of these. If we value diversity, what does this mean in terms of the makeup of our editorial board. And so having conversations like that, where you're really, really clear about of how values can actually change every single microtransaction you have with collaborators, I feel, is really, really important.
I love that because I've had those arguments about one word. I think that's the core thing is, are your missions aligned. Are you trying to help the same kinds of people. So when we work with the Gardner center, it was very much about improving teaching to help the students who need it most. This partnership started before I got to the. And so I was not involved in that. But I know from the work that I did with the Gardner center that they align with what we wanted for that program.
But at the same time, you have to make those expectations clear up front. But I also think there's something to be said about finding that place together when you work with people. So maybe not with a grant funder, but I do this all the time with authors and with people when we're talking about new projects or new booklets or whatever where you just kind of have to work together to get on the same page.
Got a couple of minutes left if anyone has another question. Well, thank you so much for joining us and a huge thank you to our speakers today. I think they did a fantastic job. I'm just glad there were some humanities sprinkled into this programming. So thank you again for joining us today.
Segment:0 .
Thank you for coming. I know we're up against shark guy thank you for spending time with us here in the humanities room. When we talk about small, I want you to understand quite just how small Carnegie Mellon University press is. We have one full time employee. It's not me.
This is officially 10% of my time. And let me tell you, it's a lot more than that. And then we have a ragtag collection of lots of people that I'll talk about in our collaborations and partnerships question that really help us get the job done. So traditionally, Carnegie Mellon University press has been mostly a poetry press. It's been going on for 50 odd years. It's published, first press to publish Rita Dove.
We've got some Pulitzer Prize winners in there. It was a bit of an idiosyncratic press in that it was run by a poet in our English department, who generated a reputation for publishing excellent poetry, but didn't necessarily believe in any of the processes of publishing. So you can imagine trying to find a contract in all of this. So, but he did a really good job of publishing poetry.
It's just that he tended to publish people that looked like him and were his friends, I would say. And so when the press became part of the libraries about a year ago now, we really sat down and thought about what we wanted the mission of this to be like while we were still trying to uphold this reputation for poetry. What What is our responsibility at this time as humanities publishers, and particularly as one of Carnegie Mellon, were already.
The humanities are kind of like fighting off I left right and center right. So we brought on a poetry editor, a drama editor, because drama is one of the big strengths of the University and a fiction editor. We just had our first content contest for publishing new plays and publishing literary translations. We're really, really focused on how inclusion is in the doing, not in the saying.
So trying to think about fresh new voices who were publishing, who were trying to open up opportunities to. And then on the other side, we're starting an academic imprint. What a time to be starting an imprint of anything, right. That brings the humanities into conversation with other disciplines around some of the big issues. So I'm not going to go down a monograph route here because it just doesn't work for us and for the kind of press we are.
But those humanities voices need to be in the conversations again, particularly in a place like Carnegie Mellon, when we are engaging and presenting ourselves to the world. All right, so the American Historical Association is the largest Historical Association in the world. And we published the flagship journal in the historical discipline. We publish a magazine.
But right now, much of our attention has been shifted to advocacy, which is mostly outside of my realm as our publishing person. But that's really where we're spending a lot of time. And part of that includes training historians to do this work. And so this really dovetails with what Doctor Shipman talked about last night with science communication.
We have the same needs in the humanities. We need historians. We need literature scholars. We need specialists to go out and say what they are saying about the Civil War or immigration or genocide is wrong. And I think that's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of values, which keeps being discussed this week, is that so much of the conversation has been about the value of science, which is very valuable, but also a lot of our values as a society come out of the humanities.
And so thinking about how to shore up those values of pushing back against white supremacy and all of the Dea removals, I'll say. So one of the things that I think about right now with our publishing program is making sure that we have diverse authors in our magazine. That's something I can control. As someone who's doing a lot of commissioning versus our journal, which mostly is getting submissions over the transom.
But really, we're very focused right now on advocacy, both at the federal level and the state level, because for us also, history education is under attack at the k-12 level. So we're sending a lot of letters to state legislatures. We're releasing statements that President Trump is not reading about the Smithsonian, about the. Well, we haven't released one yet on the Garden of American heroes, but we'll see what happens with that.
And we're currently suing the federal government over the NIH grants and the dissolution of the NIH staff. So while that's not publishing, I feel like it's all very tied up together of what are the values of our society and how do we shore them up for our larger American society. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming out.
I represent a really small University Press, University of Virginia Press. We are a tier 2 press, meaning that our revenue does not exceed $3 million. We have about 60 to 80 books a year that we bring out. We have a back catalog of about 1,200 books and in a typical calendar year, we might sell about 60,000 books. So if you think about the larger ecosystem, we're really tiny.
I always have in mind that 3 million ISBNs are assigned in the United States to books each year. Granted, 2 million of those are self-published books, but still, if you think there's a million left over and we have 60 to 80 a year, that's really tiny. But I still think we're mighty because we as part of the larger University Press ecosystem, we're really mission driven, and we're committed to peer reviewed scholarship that is the best excellent research validated.
And I think that's where University presses really make a difference to that validation. When I got this question, it was a good thing. We had just gone through a strategic plan meeting last year at the University of Virginia Press, and our strategic plan tagline kind of says it all. And that is mission driven success in a data driven age. And this is really how we're trying to meet the moment, is by making really smart publishing decisions, by looking at data and analyzing, where can we make an impact, where do books sell.
Which fields are maybe not wise to invest in, also by investing in New structures. So we just got a new database system, where we can both analyze our sales much more in a much more granular way, but also shore up our discoverability through better metadata. So that is the data side of things. But I really want to focus on the mission side of things. I always joke with my authors.
We put in non-profit. But I think that's really important because that means that the mission still prevails. And I was the head of the mission, vision, and values committee, which really brings out the German accent when I say that, and I'm pretty proud of what we came up with. So if I could just read the mission of the University of Virginia Press now is the University of Virginia Press is the scholarly publishing division of the University of Virginia.
We sustain the academic mission of the University by publishing collaborative scholarship of the highest quality, both in print and through our digital imprint, rotunda, that contributes to the growth of knowledge and understanding among readers in our Commonwealth and around the world. And there's a lot of key words in here that we're looking at collaboration, that we are committed to the highest quality and that we're committed to it both in print and digital.
So I think that's where University presses need to go and throw up both sides of the equation. And it's also important here that we have the Commonwealth of Virginia in there. So we serve our regional communities. And that's not just the academic community, that's the state of Virginia. And then also have the aspiration to contribute to knowledge throughout the world.
And then we came up with values and we were really cute about it. It reads out, read r-e-a-d, but they are also pretty important. We want to be responsive to evolving trends and practices. We want to be equitable in whom and how we publish. We want to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and we want to be diligent in curating a catalog of quality resources. So these are the kind of values we try to keep in mind with each and every acquisition, and how we treat each and every book.
And through that check system, we try to make the smartest publishing decision we can so that we publish highest quality books that find readerships and make a difference in the world. Thank you. Not working. Not working.
I'm passing around. It's totally fine. Thank you very much. Small, but mighty right. That's the theme. So let's move on to our second question. So partnerships, especially for University presses and non-profit publishers who don't have very many resources, are vital for daily tasks.
Opportunities for collaboration, better discovery of content, and many more positive reasons in my organization, for example, Project MUSE business model is all about building, leveraging, and fostering our partnerships with libraries, publishers, funders, organizations, and vendors. And they strengthen our product. And frankly, we would not be successful without them. So my question to the panel is what are the strategic partnerships, collaborations or creative relationships you are seeking or currently involved in and how do they help to grow and sustain your programs.
So I brought a few examples we have in the past 10 years or so, done a couple of different grant funded projects that resulted in publications. So we were working across the association with our teaching and learning team, with our professional affairs staff to produce products at the end of these grants or as part of these grants. So one that is a bestseller for us is careers for history majors, which was funded by the Lumina Foundation.
And so this is obviously quite small. It's got a lot of images and graphic design to it. But Lumina helped us to put this out at a time where we are constantly hearing, OK, I like history, but my mom wants me to major in engineering or go to law school. So what do I even do with a history degree other than law school. And so this was an opportunity to show a lot of different career paths and not just teaching in academia.
And we are working on a second edition of this right now, which I'm hoping will be out in print by September. Pending a lot of author work still. So all of you know how that may go. But this has, as I said, has been a bestseller. It came out in 2018. We have ended up with the great opportunity to a lot of departments, history departments and universities will buy this in bulk and then hand it out to advisees, which has been a really fantastic way to get that message out there.
And like I said, it's been successful enough. We're doing a second edition, so hopefully, that will also be a good seller. The other one is actually for faculty. We had a program with the Gardner Institute for, oh shoot, I'm going to get the name wrong, but the Gardner Institute for undergraduate education, I think. And that was a program called history gateways, where they were working on improving introductory history courses throughout the nation to better serve particularly underrepresented students.
The students who are most likely to. Leave that course with an F D, or an incomplete. And we came out of that with another small booklet which has a much less catchy title, designing introductory courses for student success, and this includes case studies and teaching reflections from some of the faculty members who are involved in that project. So working with the Gardner Institute on that was really valuable because they kind of formulated this Gateway's idea, and we're applying it across different disciplines.
And the case studies and teaching reflections was a format that they had found successful previously. So this came out last year at the end of that project, and we're about to do a second printing actually, which I was surprised. I didn't think it would be a big seller, and it wasn't a big printing, but still. So those kinds of building in your publications program with those kinds of grant funded projects and being able to report out to our stakeholders, in our case, our members and other historians who are teaching or all of those students we want to major in.
History has been a really great opportunity to share the things we've learned from those funding programs and not have them just kind of end, and then we move on to the next grant project. For us, I think for the literary side of the press. So the one that's been around for the longest students are absolutely our secret sauce. It's our biggest collaboration and our most rewarding one.
So every year, the English department at Carnegie Mellon runs a writing and publishing course. In the fall and in the spring and in the fall, the students basically are going through with their mentor the slush pile, and learning how to read a manuscript and how to assess it, because we were doing this mission shift a little bit into trying to think about new and fresh voices. It was really, really helpful to have actually the students be like, what.
What attracts you to this. What do you think your teachers would want. But like what is drawing you to this. And that was really, really exciting. And, I checked in with the editors this week and was learned how is this going. And they said, I have so much respect for these young people. They have really strong ideas. They really can take out what is speaking to them.
And then obviously we have a lot of quality controls around that and experienced editors. But this was really, really helpful. So the English department been doing that for a long time. The drama department just started doing it with their dramaturgy program. And then in the spring, the students start helping with marketing. They create pitch decks for the editorial board meeting where they talk about the audience and the author and why this person is exciting.
They are interviewing authors right now so that when we have a website relaunch in the fall, we're going to have content that will be interesting and compelling. They're advising us on book talk, social media strategy and all of this kind of thing. So they are really, really, really fantastic. And, next year. Some of the stuff we want to do is leverage that relationship with the School of Drama to think about, what.
What does it mean for these students, many of whom will end up being on Broadway to narrate audiobooks for us. And how can we begin to really tap into that kind of thing. The other places, I would say so. I know that when presses get moved under libraries, it's not always the most popular thing. But for a press that had two employees and one quit and now we only have one, we are able to leverage the marketing expertise, the accounting and billing expertise, legal assistance, branding, all of those sorts of things that come with a regular library.
And then especially with a library like ours, some of you probably our library. Dean Keith Webster, he used to work for Wiley, was publisher himself. We're basically the island of misfit toys. The provost just keeps giving us more bits to add on to the library. So it's like we're this one library with a sustainability initiative and a Botanical Institute.
And oh, look. So now we've got a press, and now we've got an entertainment Technology Center and an interdisciplinary minor program. And so they're all just like kludged together. But what helps with that is we're able to use some of those economies of scale to actually put out like 15 books a year, which is tiny. But like I said, one full time employee, a couple of other strategic partnerships, another one is actually the city of Pittsburgh and the literary scene that is really strong there.
And so our poetry editor is also the Director of the International Poetry festival. And so he has been really, really helpful in making connections with the bookstores, with the other, with the other publishers, and really trying to think about how we work in concert together. And then I'm going to teach a course for our grand challenges course for on readers and reading in the spring of 26.
And that's one of those courses that all the undergrads have to take one of them. And for me, that's an opportunity for students to learn about how presses shape what we read. And so we're going to be looking at all of these different factors there. I've got two more really quick examples and then I'll pass it on. One is we've been leveraging our architecture archives.
So this year's 125th anniversary of Carnegie Mellon. An architectural historian wanted to publish this architects journal and sketchbook and then a set of essays. And it's something we would never have been able to afford to do just on our own. But we have an architecture archive. The architecture librarian needed to spend down the endowment.
Yay we're able to put out this three volume beautiful book. And I'm really excited about it. And then finally, just the other really important partner I think for us is our faculty, who increasingly want to publish open teaching materials. Not necessarily not textbooks per se, but things that could be used in the classroom. And we can offer them the imprimatur of a University Press.
We can offer them peer review. We can offer them, impact metrics, things like that. And so that's a really interesting collaboration that's starting to take shape as we move forward. So UVA press used to be called the University Press of Virginia, and then we changed it to UVA press very strategically. But 20 years ago, because we want to be closer linked to our parent institution, UVA.
So what we've been doing recently is make that relationship even more close knit. So we've been focusing on demonstrating our value to the University and also becoming known across the University. We do not print the student catalog. We actually print high quality, award winning books. But we collaborate with UVA and try to better integrate and leverage relationships across the campus in two ways.
One is also through students. So we've recently begun working with fhd+ which is a UVA initiative to train graduate students in careers beyond the Academy. So we've been bringing in fhd+ interns that work in the editorial department, some in the marketing department, and some with me in acquisitions to train them for possible publishing careers. And then that makes us a little bit more visible across campus.
And then the other one is actually through strategic book series. So UVA has amazing research centers. And to be more closely linked to them, we have established book series very strategically with some of those units. So on my list I have the Miller center for Public Affairs and that's basically presidential studies help me in this environment, but that's where I think our books have the highest impact, because we've been able to attract practitioners to publish through UVA press.
And then those books can maybe speak back to what's happening and provide correctives. The best example for that is last year we published the Inspector General for the DOD and the DOJ, who had been in those various agencies for 20 years, and he was really trying to demonstrate the value of government oversight to maybe make an impact during the election. He failed, but I think the book is still an important one, and we wouldn't have been able to publish this book without the strategic partnership with the Miller center.
Another one is the Karsh Institute for democracy that's looking at democracy and from a global perspective. And my tagline for this series may be very cynically, is saving democracy one book at a time, two years too late. But it means we're trying and we're again trying to reach beyond the Academy to practitioners and help publish books that might make a difference on a wider scale.
And we also have a collaboration with the Carter g. Woodson Institute, and those books are going to be ever more important in this changing climate. And what's really interesting about these partnerships, they don't just make us more visible to the University and help us attract high caliber authors. They are also a financial partnership. And so what all these book series have in common, they are underwritten by the units that sponsor them.
So in we have series editor agreements that are very standard. We compensate our series editors for bringing good authors to us, but the units themselves also underwrite some production costs, which is really important now that the price of paper has gone up by up to 35% So we get a small amount, usually 2000 to $3,000 per book. But it really makes a difference in how we can price these books. Again, we are not trying to get rich here, but it helps us offset some losses and price these books affordably to maybe reach a wider audience.
So those are the relationships I want to highlight with UVA, and also for the print side of things and on the digital side of things, I think we've had really great success partnering with big foundations to start certain programs. So the Mellon Foundation back in 2002 gave us startup grants to start our digital imprint, rotunda. And then we also partnered with the National Archives on founders online.
And that's been really successful. There's been almost a million page views of our founders online per year. And then we also partnered with the Society for architectural historians on something called archipedia, which is what it sounds like. It's a Wikipedia, but for buildings, and it's really well curated and it's an open access resource, and we only have the ability to make it open access because of the partnership with SRH.
So those are just some that's a quick glimpse of all the different partnerships we have that help us create high quality content and then make some of it open access. And on the last part, I also want to highlight some of our partners, like the Miller center of fundraising right now, to maybe create endowments so that especially on the digital side of things, the endowment would generate enough money for maintenance on the back end to make some of the content of rotunda open access in perpetuity.
So they're looking at doing that for the presidential recordings that are in rotunda. So that's maybe an interesting way of going forward where we can still get the money we need to maintain the technology and keep up with technology, but we can make it an open access resource to benefit the widest readership possible. Thank you very much. So I'm going to go off our little script a little bit because I want to have a follow up question.
So I'm listening to all of these amazing collaborations. They all sound incredibly positive and really adding value to all of your publishing programs. So I'm wondering if you have any sort of tips or just advice for how to approach these partnerships, how to find and seek them out. And if you have ever encountered any challenges within the partnerships and how you might navigate that. I'm putting the panelists on the spot a little bit with this question.
I mean, I can just speak for what I did. I started at UVA in 2019. I just tried to network as much as I possibly could and email people like, hey, do you want to have a meeting. And can we talk. And some of these partnerships were just cold calls. And they generated really good outcomes. And it's also nice to have a blueprint actually.
So I established the memorandum of understanding with the Miller center. And then I had a blueprint in hand to approach the Karsh Institute. And I said, this unit is giving us this much money per book. Would you do the same for book series on your end. So those are the kind of things. The challenges is this funding environment is really tough. We don't know what's coming.
The headwinds are really strong. So with SAA, for example, I know that we are renegotiating our agreement with them and they're pleading poverty and we're pleading poverty. So now we're trying to figure out what's a fair dollar amount to keep a resource like archipedia open access. So that's what's challenging. But I think if both partners are acting in good faith and we're very transparent with one another, I think that's the key.
And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't work out. And we also try to be mindful of resources. So it's not a one size fits all with these memorandum of understanding and the kind of money we get per book from different funding sources. I mean, funding is always the problem and only getting worse. So one partner as the representative of scholarly associations up here, one partner I didn't explicitly say is our members and other historians in the field.
And so serving the membership is one of the most important parts of the mission. And what's difficult about that at is, as I said, it's quite a large association. It covers all historians and all historians of all time times and places, geographies everywhere. Every methodology. So we're not the Society of military history or the Organization of American historians or the African Studies Association.
We're covering anything historical, right. And so being able to represent that membership and serve them in our publications can be tricky. Part of that is networking, right. So we do have more. It's in the United States. We have more historians of the United States as members than any other region. But we still have significant memberships to study Europe, Africa, Latin America, et cetera.
And some of that is like a personal challenge. I'm trained as a US historian. I know that historiography really well, and who's working in that field and who's published in it, and you have to do the legwork to be able to reach those other people and get those interesting articles and things like that. So I think that's one of other than funding that can be one of the biggest challenges is serving the membership, serving all of the membership at all career levels, and also not just academics.
That's been a real big push for us over the last, I'd say, 5 to 10 years of reaching out to k-12 teachers who many, especially in independent and private schools, have PhDs and ended up going into teaching and are part of our constituency and museums and archives and librarians and the National Park Service. All of these people our historians and part of our target audience.
So I would say that's one of the big challenges. I think so, advice wise. I mean, Carnegie Mellon, I think other places, is a place of relationships and networking and talking to people and finding out what gets them excited and then trying to align what gets you excited with what gets them excited.
The challenges for us are OK. So as we are part of a library, like I said earlier, it's really helpful because we get these bits of people, but we only get little bits of people. And so that's the challenge. Where maybe I'm third in line behind this website redesign. And this other logo problem, before I can get any of that attention. And so I've had to slow my roll a bit, which can be difficult and just be a little more patient.
I think you guys talked about funding being an issue. And I think for us it's less funding because we know we're not going to get any more people and that that's what the funding would go for. And it's more time. And the fact that I already had a full time job before this became part of my full time job and yeah. So for me, that's just the challenge is like we are very scrappy, I would say.
And it all feels a little bit bound together with goodwill. And we're just trying to make sure that we have sustainable, at least processes and well documented processes that undergird that will allow for some of the scrappiness. Thank you. I like the scrappiness. All right, let's move on to our final question.
So as we've been talking about a lot, it is a challenging time for the Humanities. But I do think there are glimmers of hope. Our research brief, published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2024, reported that HBCUs are awarding more humanities bachelor's degrees than they did 25 years ago. Humanities instructors are listening more closely to their students, embracing rather than fighting AI and writing courses and working on innovative ways to reshape their programs.
For example, Washington University at ST Louis actively recruits students for humanities majors and puts their Top Instructors in front of first years. And the results have shown that the number of English majors, rising steadily for seven years in nearly doubled since their 2018 low at Hofstra University. English majors take publishing courses which help to demonstrate the value of a humanities degree and a career path.
I'm a perfect example of that. So here's my question as we look to the future for University presses and non-profit publishing, what are your thoughts on humanities and social sciences scholarship and where will it go. How will it evolve, innovate, and more importantly, sustain its value. Who would like to start.
I think that's the million dollar question. Maybe literally. What we are thinking through at UVA press is both the print and the digital side, and there's two different answers for those formats. Let me start with the digital side. But actually let me start with the big problem for University presses, which is there was a Chronicle of higher education article in May of 2024, and the headline was is this the end of reading.
And then I think a lot of people saw the Atlantic article last November, which basically said, what was the title, the elite college students who can't read books. Well, there goes our audience. So University presses had to pivot in the late aughts to more diverse audiences. Until then, libraries were our best customers. And then starting in the 2010s, that diversified.
And we really bet on course adoptions before then, course adoption was a bonus, and then course adoption sort of became the bread and butter of University Press publishers, so that we were really looking to students as the core audience. And if a book is adopted in a course, you have 20 guaranteed sales and five courses. That is really, really good, especially for the backlist.
And if students don't read anymore, what do we do. And then maybe the answer is providing educational resources in more interactive digital formats. So we've also been trying that. And there's one of our partners in the audience, Alison Levy from Brown University digital publications. And we were really lucky to get the first born digital project out of Alison's shop called furnace and Fugue, which brought to life a early modern German alchemical book.
And it's a true born digital anthology. And it has music. It's beautifully done. It has transcriptions, translations of this old alchemical book. And we were amazed to see that as a print book, we would have maybe printed 750 copies of an edited volume, but this born digital publication had 70,000 engagements a few months after it was released.
So that was really revealing to us because we can use our same processes, have it peer reviewed, have it validated, make sure it's this high quality academic product and then reach a massive audience. And I know engagement is not the same as reading a book cover to cover, but it is revealing. And so we're going to be investigating more in collaboration with Brown University Digital publications and other entities like Brown.
If we can bring more born digital scholarship to audiences. And what helped us in that process is using our same validation strategies, having a peer reviewed, having it approved by our board of directors. And then translating that to these other formats. So we're actually looking into virtual reality now. So that's on the digital side.
On the print side, if the student market is breaking away. This is where the Commonwealth part of our mission statement serving the state of Virginia and its audience is really important, because we're pivoting to regional trade. And University presses have done that for ages, because the big trade presses don't serve regions as well as University presses can. But we've also haven't been sustained in that at Virginia.
But now we do. We have a new imprint called Ravana books, and that's histories and stories about the state of Virginia and its peoples for audiences in Virginia. And it's been really encouraging. I don't know if any of you saw the Mellon Foundation 2017 report on University Press, publishing and print runs and sales and the. It's the best data we still have about University Press book sales.
And the average monograph in five years sells 643 copies. And that's high. Actually, it's declined since then. Whereas with some of these regional books, our best seller is a book on grace Sherwood, the only witch to be convicted in the state of Virginia. And the book is called The witch of pongo, and it's sold over 3,000 copies, and it's not even been out a year.
So that's really encouraging to us. And it's also a platform so we can tell the stories of Black Virginians. We can tell the stories of LGBTQIA2S Virginians. So that's where we're putting our focus now on state books for these audiences while still doing the scholarly books will always be our bread and butter. But by pivoting to this regional imprint, we can also have an impact beyond the academic market.
OK OK. We are lucky in that almost every American knows what history is. So that's already a step ahead of many people and everyone's dad loves it. Or grandpa. Father's Day is coming up. The dad books are going to sell.
The Lincoln biographies, the World War two books. You all know what I'm talking about. So being able to harness that audience for serious history researchers, not Bill O'Reilly is I think, a challenge which Nadine is facing as well at UVA. And so I think a lot about that public engagement piece to come back to where I started. I have been running an op Ed workshop. This next annual meeting will be the fourth one for historians to learn how to write op eds and get their published publications and their research in front of the public.
And actually, one thing I thought was really fun is that our meeting was in New York in January, and I put together what we called a pitch slam, which I Stole from another association, where we had editors from major publications there, and attendees could sign up to pitch them in two minutes. So they got up in front of a microphone and said, hi, I'm Laura Ainslie, and I would like to write an article for time about sex education would have been mine.
So that was really great in that it gave people the opportunity to have face time with people who work at Time Magazine and the Smithsonian Magazine. We were supposed to have the Atlantic, but Johnny had to drop out, but Jelani Cobb chaired it for me, which was really wonderful. But finding those opportunities to meet the public where they are, like we've been talking about at many of these sessions, is so important.
And for history, especially when the humanities in general are so under attack. But our national story is really being interrogated and whitewashed and pushed up against. We're really kind of turning back the clock on some of the progress we've made. And so making sure that people know these statistics are being told about immigration is not true. And immigration hasn't been like that since x year and since these acts.
And there was a reason we liberalized immigration in 1965. Et cetera. I think that's a really important mission and something that I really want to in my role at the help our community to push forward, whether that's op eds, whether that's podcasts, wherever they can meet the public. I loved the idea last night of the bar night of like two scientists sit down at the bar.
I think humanity scholars should do that. Go out and say, hey, I'm an expert in James Baldwin, come talk to me or whatever. Like, that'd be so fun. So I really think there's an opportunity right now while we are in this era where the humanities are in such trouble to take these stories that we know so well and bring them to the public and help to shore up these values and the progress that's been made, though never linearly.
Wow OK. So no no no, that was great. That was great. 100% agree that basically students. People in graduate school need to be learning how to communicate their research. They need to be learning about how to create a persona and think about pitching to them.
All of that. Yes, also to the local, I think our very best selling book, which is probably under written several volumes of poetry, is Pittsburgh the Paris of Appalachia by a local, which I definitely saw an uptick during the whole JD Vance sofa fiasco that was going on in the fall. All right. But more seriously, it feels like given the current moment, I was going to swear, but I'm not.
It feels like more important than ever that the humanities are in dialogue, not just with the public but with other disciplines because the humanities and maybe I'm just someone with a French PhD at Carnegie Mellon, and I'm suffering like I'm like, all of these conversations are happening about AI, about data sovereignty. All of these kinds of things and the humanities bring or can introduce an epistemological diversity to those conversations.
That's really, really important. They can bring a global lens to the conversations that are happening and a critical one. And so that feels really important to me that we are, as publishers, thinking about putting people in conversation around topics that people care about. And then the other one is just this piece about the public. And not necessarily talking at the public, but talking with the public in a language that as if there was one public publics.
It feels to me. And then these last two points are a little bit much broader higher education things, but that I think really have a trickle down effect here. And one is that I feel like every humanities degree, needs to have a public humanities requirement. And that should be what we're focusing on. And I think we need a coin of the realm that isn't a scholarly monograph, that the thing that gets people tenure and promotion is not something where they lock themselves away for five years and then eventually it appears and then four years later, they're able to say, someone cited it.
And so it feels like there's a mixture of communication and audience and format and meeting people where they are. And if there is this crisis of reading, then what are the other ways that we can communicate this work. All of it. Yeah, I don't know. I'm done.
I think this is working. Oh, good. I think this is a great time to pause and take some questions from the audience. So I'm going to run this mic down. Any questions. Thoughts comments. All on people.
Listening I'm a oh Marcel with floss. How can people who are in the science publishing help with this since we're talking about strategic partnerships.
Some of you mentioned some of these are cold calls and some of them aren't. How can we as scientific publishing people help with getting your work out there and seen by more people who need it. Science and humanities collaboration. I'll make a pitch for a history of science column in your journal that talks about the history, the cultural history of certain argument that's being made by a piece.
That could be cool. Yeah, that was exactly where I was going to go. I used to run a blog on. I was managing editor of the blog nursing Cleo, which is a history of the intersections of gender and health medicine. We have a book coming out this fall with Rutgers press. I hope everyone checks it out. Thank you.
But I think that all of science has humanities aspects to it, whether it's the history aspect, like right now, we need people to understand why vaccines exist and see those charts of the measles vaccine was introduced and then the measles deaths went down. But there's also other humanities aspects. Like there's literary aspects. There's the I think in the Dea realm, this is really important to recognize why groups have been underrepresented or not included at different times.
So I love this idea of a history column, but have a historian do it. There are a lot of historians of medicine who are MDs, and they don't do great history all the time. So partner with experts in those fields that you're interested in working with because each discipline has its own methodologies and methods of writing and research. And we can help each other out with those things and maybe building on that, if you do joint issues with the humanities journal, that could be really fruitful and also invite humanities scholars to submit articles and there's a journal for everything.
So if the American Chemical Society wants to partner with the Journal of the history of chemistry, you could do that. I would say, too, that the other thing is that literature scholars who often don't get necessarily thought about in this are really, really good at close reading. That is what they spent years learning how to do and then connecting those to other pieces. I mean, they're the OG evidence synthesis.
And so thinking about how those kind of skills could be useful, could be brought into conversation with some of this content. And particularly with some of the almost word again, that's coming out of the government. And so yeah. Thank you. Hi OK, great.
It's working. I'm Catherine, I'm with the American Sociological Association. My question is also about partnerships, and specifically when you're looking for partners, especially with these smaller presses and society publishers being so mission driven, that being such an integral part of what we do, how do you go about making sure that the partnerships and the foundations and those you're looking to work with are going to be aligned with your values and your publishing mission.
And then the second part of my question is just practically, when you are reaching out to them, what sort of strategic choices or what do you find. Do they tend to find compelling in terms of why they should work with you. Those are two really interesting questions, I think. The first one is when we commission a series, it has to be peer reviewed, just like a book would.
And so we send out a series, book series proposal and the would be editors CVS. And then it's peer reviewed and it has to go through the board approval process. So they're really put to the test as to their bona fides. And the peer review does change things actually. Maybe recommending a different editor is added or the focus of the series should change. So that's one way we quality control.
And then in terms of how to make ourselves look like a good partner to different entities, I usually go with it's good for your donors route, actually. And so I know a lot of the entities with whom we partner, they then use, they get a certain number of those books that are published through these collaborations as free copies to give to their donors. And so that's a value added, beautifully presented book.
And then they also can feel good about themselves that they're increasing knowledge in the world. So that's been proven successful to me. I want to dig into your question about values and values alignment, because it's something I've been thinking about this whole meeting because lots of us have been throwing around of scholarly publishing values or we share, I don't know that anyone's actually sat down and said, what do you mean when you use this word.
And for humanities people. So I'm part of a group called mattress sutures, and we've been doing these values workshops with humanities scholars. And I tell you, there's nothing like a group of 20 humanities scholars arguing over the meaning of a word for three hours. All right. And so when we talk about values, I think we need to be really careful that we have built consensus with the people we are claiming shared values with.
And then that we've said, OK, if these are the words that describe, what does that look like in practice if we value equity, what does that mean when it comes to recognition of peer reviewers or payment or any of these. If we value diversity, what does this mean in terms of the makeup of our editorial board. And so having conversations like that, where you're really, really clear about of how values can actually change every single microtransaction you have with collaborators, I feel, is really, really important.
I love that because I've had those arguments about one word. I think that's the core thing is, are your missions aligned. Are you trying to help the same kinds of people. So when we work with the Gardner center, it was very much about improving teaching to help the students who need it most. This partnership started before I got to the. And so I was not involved in that. But I know from the work that I did with the Gardner center that they align with what we wanted for that program.
But at the same time, you have to make those expectations clear up front. But I also think there's something to be said about finding that place together when you work with people. So maybe not with a grant funder, but I do this all the time with authors and with people when we're talking about new projects or new booklets or whatever where you just kind of have to work together to get on the same page.
Got a couple of minutes left if anyone has another question. Well, thank you so much for joining us and a huge thank you to our speakers today. I think they did a fantastic job. I'm just glad there were some humanities sprinkled into this programming. So thank you again for joining us today.
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