University presses launch new charter

More than 100 university presses around the world have signed up to the University Press Charter, a new initiative affirming a desire to “shape a better future for scholarly publishing.”

Signatories make commitments in six areas, including keeping human judgment at the centre of AI use in publishing, and striving to expand access to knowledge, including tackling barriers faced by less well-funded researchers and institutions,

At launch, 138 publishers from 31 countries have signed up. The charter emerged from a collaboration led by Cambridge University Press and Bristol University Press, and its other founding members are Edinburgh University Press, Liverpool University Press, Manchester University Press, Princeton University Press, and University of London Press.

University presses matter, the charter affirms, for a number of reasons: their role in connecting universities, scholarship, and society; their upholding of quality, integrity, and trust; and their championing of the “full diversity of scholarship,” including sustaining knowledge and ideas “whose value extends far beyond their commercial returns.”

The charter is hosted and supported by the Association of University Presses, and is said to have followed on from conversations which identified shared challenges facing presses of different sizes and models. It stresses that there is no one single model for a university press, nor a “single route to a better scholarly communication system.”