An article by Paul N. Courant was quoted in an Inside Higher Ed story about a recent, special issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing focused on reforms of the university press business model.
In "What Might Be in Store for Universities' Presses," the article he wrote for The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Courant discusses the relationship among presses, publishing in academia, and host institutions. "[P]ublication is an essential element of scholarly work," he writes. "It is thus squarely on mission for universities to support the distribution of their own faculties' work. This can be done in a variety of ways, including subventions for formal publication elsewhere, establishing and promoting the use of institutional repositories, and other relatively (relative to formal press publication) low-cost means of producing and distributing work on the web, with or without complementary print on demand capability. The university could also support the development of consulting expertise, available to the faculty, on publishing mechanisms and venues that the faculty could use."