How can a university press survive and flourish when faced with constant technical change and increasingly monolithic commercial competition? In this interview, Allison Belan, Director for Strategic Innovation and Services at Duke University Press, describes her 20+ years with Duke, and how during that time the publisher has innovated and adapted to changes in technology and business models: from manual paste-up and film output to digital-first, the publishing values have remained constant.
One key element of the Duke strategy has been in aligning digital publishing practices across books and journals. Recognizing that digital assets could be integrated to support a cohesive infrastructure, Duke developed internal platforms that could handle XML, EPUB, and PDF files, ensuring interoperability and discoverability. Duke was also among the first presses to build a comprehensive e-book platform and directly sell ebooks to libraries, setting a benchmark in scholarly digital distribution. Along with this technical development, Duke established digital journal collections, now comprising 65 journals, that it offers directly to libraries.
More recent innovations include the Scholarly Publishing Collective, launched 2021. Recognizing that many university presses face similar challenges, especially in journal hosting and digital dissemination, Duke University Press took a pioneering step by developing a shared platform. Initially born out of Duke’s success in building a digital infrastructure to manage its own journal program, the Collective grew out of a need for affordable but full-featured subscription sales and hosting. When JSTOR announced the sunset of its journal hosting service in 2020, Duke responded by designing a business model to host, sell, and support academic journals independently, migrating over 150 journals and 140,000 articles onto a new platform, creating a consortial-like service that supports independent publishers. The Collective leverages Duke’s technological expertise, project management, and sales infrastructure to provide open access and subscription services, particularly suitable for smaller publishers challenged with the problem of scholarly dissemination issues. The Collective joined the earlier Project Euclid as the second of Duke’s publisher services initiatives. Taken together, the Collective and Project Euclid demonstrate how shared infrastructure can be used to maintain publisher independence with effective dissemination.
Direct to Open
Duke supports OA monograph publishing in a number of ways. It runs a direct-to-open (D2O) publishing program,aiming to convert around 20 titles annually into OA, supported by library funding through partnerships with MIT Press, and it has a partnership with the California Digital Library to open already-published Duke books by California-system authors and to front-list books by such authors. While the OA model holds promise, the sustainability of OA monographs remains uncertain. Budget constraints in higher education, especially amid shifting federal and state funding, pose challenges. She notes that the continuity of the monograph as a scholarly artifact depends on whether universities value these long-form works for tenure and advancement. In addition, Allison discusses how the decline in print runs for monographs, driven by declining library acquisitions, raises questions about their future physical format, despite the continued demand for it, but emphasizes that a core value of the humanities monograph lies in in-depth, interdisciplinary scholarship—regardless of format.
The Impact of AI and Emerging Technologies
While AI is undoubtedly a hot topic across all sectors, the most immediate uses for AI are likely to be in peer review and content discoverability. For instance, AI might be used to flag low-quality or AI-assisted submissions, helping maintain research integrity. The question of licensing titles for use in large language models (LLMs) is still under exploration; the press is assessing how to build agreements that protect authors’ intellectual property and uphold the scholarly record.
Duke’s Strengths
What sets Duke apart? The willingness to develop innovative business models, such as D2O, creating independent publishing platforms, and collaborations like Project Euclid and the Collective. The team’s technological expertise enables fast adaption to industry shifts, such as the transition to OA or the loss of core journal infrastructure services. These strengths—combined with Duke’s core publishing strengths of interdisciplinarity, critical theory, and supporting new fields of inquiry—form the foundation of the press’s identity.
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