What Do (University Press) Authors Want? Results of an Author Survey of University of Michigan Press Authors

Introduction

The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is a midsize member of the Association of University Presses, one of around 100 institutional publishers in the USA with the designation “university press.” Focusing on publishing books in a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines, UMP also has a strategic focus on innovative publishing models. UMP is particularly focused on the development of digital scholarship and expanding knowledge dissemination through open access. 

To better meet these new strategic initiatives, UMP administration and staff wanted to better understand what they publish. Do author expectations match with the Press’s strategy? To answer this question I asked recently published authors and volume editors what their preferences are when choosing a monograph publisher, and how working with UMP aligned (or did not align) with those preferences. those preferences.

Methodology

The approach taken to understanding author perceptions and experiences was an email survey. The first step in creating the survey was identifying the pool of authors. The criteria for inclusion in the survey sample were: 

• Scholarly monograph authors and volume editors of collections with an ebook available in the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection (EBC).
• Publication year of 2022 or 2023.

The reason for confining the study to 2022 and 2023 books was that these authors had been through the entire experience of being published by U-M Press, but recently enough to remember their experiences.

Having defined the survey population, I needed to identify a short set of questions to ask. I met with different departments within the Press (Acquisitions, Production, and Sales, Marketing and Outreach) to learn the types of questions the staff wanted to ask Press authors. This exploration phase involved meetings with staff members, learning how to use U-M’s Qualtrics platform, and looking at previously completed surveys from other university presses.

I found the collaborative study of scholars conducted by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press particularly helpful. This survey, completed in Summer 2019, looked at how authors, readers, and researchers really see the monograph (OUP, 2019), and served as a framework for identifying research gaps that exist between university presses and their authors and values.

Recent publicly available book author surveys have focused on narrower themes such as attitudes to peer review or Open Access. These include studies conducted at U-M Press. J. Frankl’s 2023 survey focuses on disciplinary variation in attitudes to scholarly publishing (Frankl, 2023). The author focused mostly on Open Access. Another Tiny Study Blog completed by Ani Bezirdzhyan focused on OA attitudes of authors and readers. Ani’s approach was a particular influence on my work.

Framing the questions to elicit honest and insightful responses was challenging. I am grateful to assessment specialist Dr. Craig Smith and the reviewers who determined my IRB exemption. I also iterated on the questions using feedback from Press staff on two pilot versions of the survey. Along with the wording of questions, the order of questions was also considered, reflecting on the natural progression of the entire publication process and the departments and staff authors would be working with. A final round of edits was made, taking the survey down from over 30 questions to 21 to keep it near Dr. Smith’s proposed 5-7 minute completion time. Also on Dr. Smith’s advice, a diversity of multiple-choice, Likert scale, and short free-text response questions were included, with some responses required and others optional.

Ahead of the launch of the survey, an introductory email was sent out by the Press director introducing my work. This email included the option to opt-out of being surveyed, which nine authors did. The next day I distributed the survey using a personalized email template developed in Qualtrics. To minimize the work of respondents, the email’s contact list included embedded data on author names, publication titles, and email addresses. Of the 245 surveys sent out, 96 completed surveys were recorded for a 45% response rate. The responses were notable for the wide spread of disciplines represented (see Figure 1). 27% of total respondents had most recently published within the Political Science discipline, with a large margin between the second highest International Relations discipline at 11% and Asian Studies at 10% alongside ‘Other’ specialties that were filled in Environmental Studies and other Social Science subjects.

Fig. 1: Subject area affinity for author respondents. See complete Fig. 1. 

The Findings

Three main questions shaped the analysis of the survey: 

• What are the key reasons authors choose to publish with UMP? (i.e. prestige or reputation, Open Access, working with Press staff, etc.)
• Is there a correlation between disciplinary background subject and publication preferences among authors?
• Is there a difference between first-time and returning author preferences?

For analysis of the completed surveys, a series of filters were applied to the data sets to look at emerging trends. The filters chosen were inspired by Dalton et al’s use of filters, and were completed on Qualtrics. With the guidance of the OUP and CUP collaborative report, and a John Hopkins published report looking at cluster identities to analyze in terms of subject discipline and productivity (Dalton, Tenopir, Björk et. al, 2020) analysis was completed. The analysis of identity clusters and emerging trends will be discussed in the next section.

Fig. 2: Influencing characteristic affinity for author responses. See complete Fig. 2.

• The relationship with the editor is particularly significant in choosing University of Michigan Press.

‘Top press in my discipline’ was the top selection followed by ‘Relationship with editor’ and ‘Quality of Production’, with 'Commitment to Open Access' and ‘Commitment to accessibility’  chosen with a lower percentage of prioritization. While the fact that authors want to choose the most prestigious press is unsurprising, the importance of the acquisitions editor relationship is striking. University presses pride themselves on investing in highly skilled internal staff, and it is clear that this is an investment authors value. It is interesting to see in the comments that authors did not necessarily distinguish between their relationship with the acquisitions editor or the production editor, although these are different functions with the press. They saw this as all part of the personal editorial relationship.

The 14% of respondents that viewed the opportunity to publish Open Access as influential was surprisingly low, even though UMP has been a leader in expanding its open access publishing. For example, the University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission program makes 75% (in 2022 it was 50%, in 2023 it was 75%) of the new scholarly books it publishes each year Open Access without requiring authors to pay thanks to the support of the U-M Provost and libraries that purchase UMP EBC. However, it is clear that open access falls way below the opportunity to publish with the best press in authors’ hierarchy of needs. 

• Influences for choosing University of Michigan Press varies between Humanities and Social Science disciplines.

Filtering influence choice by subjects into “Humanities” and “Social Sciences,” was important to understand what authors prioritize within the divide of disciplines. Social Science subjects (Political Science and International Relations) were consistent with authors prioritizing UM-Press’s resources and discipline prestige with top choices residing in the ‘Top press in discipline(s)’ and ‘Commitment to Open Access’ categories. 

The majority of Humanities subjects from American Studies to the ‘Other’ subject choice- under which listed subjects included Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies- chose ‘Relationship with editor’, and ‘Commitment to Accessibility’ as the top determinants of their choice of U-M Press. You can view each subject and influence choice in Fig. 3 (external link).

• Authors return to U-M Press because of their editorial relationships, especially in certain disciplines.

Qualtrics populates a report that enables researchers to filter questions and responses for further data analysis. A series of filters were applied to the data set comparing first-time and returning authors across both subject areas and influences. The first questions of the survey asked if the author was first-time or returning. Eighty of the 96 respondents were first-time UMP authors.

The first filter analyzed influencing preferences for first-time authors and subject area published. This filter showed a large margin of first-time publications falling under the Political Science subject area, with 28% of responses, or 27 of 80 authors. The second most popular subject area was International Relations at 11%, with 11 authors. First-time authors were also filtered through the question: “Which of the following considerations influenced your choice?” 25% of first-time authors chose ‘Top Discipline’, with 16% choosing both ‘Open Access’ and ‘Top Discipline’.

Returning authors showed similar results for subject area, with 23% publishing under Political Science, followed by Theater at 14%. For the influencing factors of choosing UMP, 23% prioritized ‘Commitment to Open Access' and ‘Quality of production’, followed by 'Relationship with editor’ at 19% and ‘Top press’ choice at 13%. Returning authors returned to U-M Press because they had a good relationship with their editor. Theater is a discipline where authors felt particularly motivated by their relationship with their editor, with many singling out the long-time theater editor as being a significant contributor to their discipline.

• UMP authors and editors recognize UMP’s Open Access initiatives, even if they are not the primary motivator.

To understand how authors viewed the entire publication process with UMP, questions such as “Why did you choose to publish with UMP?” and “What was your favorite part of publishing with UMP?” were asked to open up a wider array of answers. From these prompts came the trend of OA mentions, which made the OA-specific attitudes similar to those found in the previously mentioned surveys, including the 14% that selected it as an influence for choosing UMP.

"I was impressed with their commitment to Open Access publishing."

“For its positive stance on fair use and Open Access in scholarly work.”

“We got Open Access through Knowledge Unlatched which was largely UMP’s initiation. We are forever grateful for that."

• Book authors are interested in citations most of all.

The question “How interested are you in obtaining the totals, metrics, or statistics for the following indicators of engagement?” was also asked. Five indicators were ranked using a Likert scale from 0-5 stars (0 being uninterested, 5 being extremely interested). Fig. 4 (external link) shows the interest ratings from the following indicators:

 Citations 

• Geographical location of readers
• Review outlets
• Sales 
• Social media mentions
• Policy document mentions

Each indicator was required to be filled out in the survey, giving the most mixed results. 

Authors were most interested in citations (77% of respondents gave it 5 stars), and review outlets (62% rated it 5 stars). Policy document mentions had the most one star ratings with 25%, and also had 33% of the 5 star ratings, a difference of seven responses.

The interest in the type of engagement markers that presses offer can be different, with this survey showing the surprising interest in citations coming from Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) books, where citation importance is normally associated with Science, Technical and Medicine (STM) journals. Seeing the comparison of known HSS and STM press author interest in metrics would be interesting on a larger scale.

Directions for Future Research

Once the survey email had been sent out, many authors responded they were too busy to complete the survey. This could be due to the length of the survey or the fact that the survey was released after the academic semester had begun. There is a possibility more faculty would complete the survey while on academic break, but that is unfounded as the survey link was available to respondents from September 5-October 3, 2024. The number of respondents in this survey was small, and completion bias could be present as completion times ranged from 4.5 minutes to almost 90 minutes. Also of note is that over 60% of respondents completed the survey within the first week, and fifteen surveys were left unsubmitted. If looking to complete a similar survey again, looking at academic calendars to find a more convenient time for authors and editors would be a smart consideration.

It would be interesting to open this survey up to a larger sample pool of authors, including both 2024 authors and authors before 2022. It would also be interesting to see if pre- and post- pandemic practices changed preferences, not only at University of Michigan Press, but across the university press publishing landscape. 

Further research on university press publication landscapes and themes amongst digital scholarship is recommended for both presses and libraries.

For a more detailed look at the included figures, follow the link below.

https://umich.yul1.qualtrics.com/reports/public/dW1pY2gtNjcyNTJjNmMwYzg4MjYwMDA4Njk2MWIyLVVSXzZWNlNhbW5XVzV5SVdrNg==