Indiana University Press celebrates 75 years

In the early 2000s, academic publishing started to become more digital, making scholarship more openly accessible and available, said Ellis, who manages scholarly communications and research data services for IU Libraries Bloomington, and oversees IU Press. 
 
IU Press has a productive and influential history as a non-profit university press, created in 1950 by former IU President Herman B Wells. In 2012 its operations became part of IU Libraries Bloomington, one of the first to lead a national trend toward alignment of library and press efforts in scholarly publishing.  
 
Among 160 university presses in 16 countries, IU Press is internationally recognized, and while its first nine books were published in 1951, its backlist now includes 3,500 titles, including many open access books and journals.
 
The goal is to strengthen academic publishing overall and to better align the interests and strengths in publishing between IU Libraries and IU Press, explained Ellis.  She notes that efforts toward this began at IU several years ago and reports a growing momentum, nationally, for increased attention to digital publishing and open access in scholarly publishing. 

“We have a renewed view of this concept that we’re trying to envision with the Libraries and the Press today,” said Ellis. “We’re all in this environment of trying to make scholarship available and create opportunities to share scholarship,” Ellis said. 
 
Annie Martin, IU Press editorial director since January, leads a team of acquisition editors who work with its Faculty Board and book series editors. They choose about 75 new books for IU Press to publish annually. Additionally, the press publishes 40 peer-reviewed journals.  
 
In the coming years IU Press is focused on supporting IU’s mission and its well-known academic areas with specializations in the humanities and social sciences, said Martin. Some of those areas include African, Russian, East European and Jewish studies, folklore, and film and media. About 75 percent of IU Press books are scholarly monographs, and a quarter of those are authored by Indiana University scholars. IU Press also publishes what are known as “trade books” on topics relevant to its geographic home in southern Indiana.  These cover a variety of interests such as travel, paleontology, railroads, transportation, and regional stories.  

Martin expects IU Press to offer more open access to scholarly books, both new and backlist titles.  While IU Press does not have plans to stop its work to print and publish physical books, Martin says digital open access is “our new way of looking forward.”

IU Press got into digital publishing in a big way in 2019 with help from a $183,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. The grant funded the digitization of 201 out-of-print books. IU Press also works with the Big Ten Academic Alliance to digitize backlist titles and make them openly available. In 2022, IU Press contributed 20 titles to a shared collection of 100 digital books on gender and sexuality studies. This year, they will contribute 17 titles to the upcoming Big Ten collection on Environment, Experience, and Health.  

In further efforts to make IU Press titles more available to readers, IU Press publishes about 40 new books each year as both print and digitally open access. In the current scholarly publishing climate, Ellis said strong reasons exist to integrate a more meaningful collaboration to strengthen IU’s overall academic publishing.  

“We’re finding ways to leverage our work flows, expertise and staff,” said Ellis, who became more involved in working with IU Press leaders in early 2025. “My role is to provide the administrative leadership to advise, support and facilitate the work of both the publishing that occurs in the Libraries and in the Press. With the Press’ three directors, we’re carving new paths and trying new things.” In addition to Martin, they include Michael Regoli, director of publishing operations, and Gigi Lamm, director of sales and marketing.

“There’s a lot to be shared across the various ways of publishing,” Ellis explained. The two entities are actively communicating and working together on editorial tools, for example, to improve the respective ways they use editing software to manage and distribute online journals, she said. 

IU Libraries has also been engaged in its own publishing efforts. Since 2008, IU Libraries has supported online journal publishing for IU affiliated departments, faculty, and students. They work with a wide variety of journal editors to either launch a new open access journal or “flip” an existing journal to become openly accessible. For the last five years, IU Libraries has also helped instructors to develop and publish open educational resources to reduce the costs of course materials and textbooks for students. The resulting publications are made available to students for free. IU Libraries has also recently established an additional open access publishing program that supports the creation and dissemination of longer-form digital publications and encourages experimentation with formats. This publishing program is intended to support works that enrich IU’s research, teaching, and public engagement and is exclusively for IU faculty, students, and staff.

“Between IU Libraries and IU Press, we have more spaces and resources to experiment in different formats,” Ellis stressed. “We are all thinking about how we support work that’s important to IU, to our state and to our region, and make opportunities available for that kind of scholarship to get out into the world.”