Shift in traditional university publishing

The University of Missouri will soon be without a university press. The university announced last week that it would phase out its press, beginning in July. The news was made public in a larger statement about the university's shifting strategic priorities.

Such announcements about other university presses have often spurred protests and attempts to save them, but so far at least, the news about the Missouri press has been greeted quietly.

One close observer of scholarly publishing, Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, noted in a blog post for Publishers Weekly that "the impact of such closures is mediated by how the academic community handles the larger transformations in publishing." He wrote that while closing university presses might lead to "a diminution of the number of outlets for scholarly work, it could just as easily be a more positive bellwether for a healthy shift in emphasis from one model of scholarly publishing to another."...