The Association continues to collect and disseminate essential information on our sector of the scholarly communications industry. The Annual University Press Operating Statistics for 2018-2021 was completed and shared with participating presses and the member community in April 2022; and the longstanding Quarterly Sales Comparison reports have continued. These statistical programs are carried out by a confidential agent, analyst Kimberly Schmelzinger.
The Biennial Compensation Survey published the most recent survey results in Spring 2021, these were made available to all member press directors. The (binary) gender pay analysis first commissioned for the Gender Equity and Cultures of Respect Task Force in 2018 was conducted again with 2020 data, and the Association commissioned additional research and analysis into the impact of location on salaries, in terms of regional price parity. In 2021, following recommendations from the AUPresses Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Committee to provide broader access to the Compensation Survey information, the Board of Directors instructed staff to prepare an overview of the 2020 Compensation Survey Report that would share high-level analysis but protect detailed salary data that had been collected with specific expectations of confidentiality and distribution; this was distributed to the full membership community at the end of the year. The Board also decided that future data collection must allow for wider dissemination of fully anonymized aggregated data.
President-Elect Charles Watkinson (Michigan) has launched a joint project with the Society for Scholarly Publishing to collect publishing job descriptions from throughout our communities and create a reference database usable by the publishing workforce and scholarly communications and higher ed HR professionals. Look for more information under the Task Force on Career Progression.
Under the leadership of AUPresses Open Access Committee Chair John Sherer (North Carolina) and past Open Access Task Force Chair Erich Van Rijn (California), the Association applied for and was awarded a Level 1 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the impact of OA editions on print sales of scholarly books. Work on the study began in February 2022 and is expected to continue into next year. Ithaka S+R research consultants Laura Brown and Roger Schonfeld will collaborate with the AUPresses project team.