An Exploratory Study to Measure the Value and Reach of a University Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
University presses publish works of scholarly, intellectual, or creative merit tailored to an audience of specialists or a group with a shared interest. They also connect their host institution to local and regional communities and generate positive publicity for the institution. In recent years, however, university presses have faced increased scrutiny for myriad financial reasons. The purpose of this study was to measure the extrinsic and intrinsic value of one university press by gathering multiple sources of data on productivity, academic reach, and peer comparisons. Additionally, many of the press’s recently published authors completed an anonymous online survey about their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction with aspects of the publishing process. Despite the press’s recent financial struggles, the results of this study showed evidence of the press’s benefits and value, and authors who responded to the survey reported high rates of satisfaction, personal and scholarly growth, and positive outcomes from their publishing experience. The methods of data gathering undertaken for this study may be instructive for others contemplating a similar evaluation of their press’s value. Specifically, the survey described herein aimed to measure the value of the press in the view of one of its primary stakeholders — its authors — and similarly designed surveys could measure the value of the press in the view of other important stakeholders. Important implications for the press’s practices and future avenues of research are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.104 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".