The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) mission statement recognizes that “AUPresses advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge.” The 28 translations of this statement—ranging from American Sign Language and Arabic to Thai and Yiddish—displayed in rotation throughout our web site evoke this far-reaching community.
AUPresses expressed our global engagement over the past year by:
- Signing on to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) Publishers Compact in October 2021.
- Supporting the AUPresses Global Partner Program pilot, which seeks to deepen transnational dialogue and collaboration by pairing member presses with non-member presses in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. During calendar year 2021, African Minds from South Africa partnered with Duke University Press from the United States; unfortunately, Makerere University Press from Uganda, who had been paired with Liverpool University Press from the UK, withdrew from the pilot. We look forward to applying lessons learned during this first year to a second iteration of the pilot.
- Supporting the formation of Even UP by 17 UK and Irish university presses, an initiative that aims to provide a geographically specific forum for equity, diversity, and inclusion information collection, benchmarking, and training.
The Association also continued to join with scholarly publishing and library colleagues in professional exchange and network-building conferences:
- AUPresses continues to serve on the international steering committee for Peer Review Week. Committee members, including External Communications Manager Annette Windhorn, collaborated on an article about the 2021 event’s theme, What Does Identity in Peer Review Mean to You?, for The Scholarly Kitchen.
- The Association will support the fourth biennial UP Redux, organized by the Association of Learned and Professional Scholarly Publishers (ALPSP) and Cambridge University Press during the spring of 2022.