AUPresses’ core values—equity and inclusion, intellectual freedom, integrity, and stewardship—have continued to be essential and energizing in the past year, providing a firm foundation upon which the Association stands, speaks, and acts.
The Association has continued to join with peer organizations to speak out in support of the trustworthy and wide-ranging scholarship that university presses help steward and against governmental or corporate overreach in the US and elsewhere. Applying our values in response to the current political moment, the Association:
- Joined with the American Association of Colleges and Universities and hundreds of other leaders in higher education, first to call for constructive engagement with the Trump Administration (April 2025), and then to refute its ideologically driven and coercive “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” (October 2025).
- Voiced firm opposition, along with the American Council of Learned Societies, to the federal overreach into Smithsonian Institution museums’ presentation of American history.
- Affirmed our shared commitment to research integrity with other scholarly communications leaders—the Association of College and Research Libraries; the Association of Research Librarians; the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers; and the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
- Supported the International Statement on the Freedom of Expression, and the Freedoms to Read and Publish—created by the International Publishers Association and others—underlining the essential and interconnected nature of these freedoms and urging that they be respected in law and in practice.
- Signed the Publishing Inclusion Pledge, organized by the Publishers Association in the UK and aimed at helping publishers to take meaningful action to build a more inclusive publishing industry there.
- Provided our members with updates and information regarding settlement claims in the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit brought against the AI company Anthropic for using books to train large language models without copyright holders’ permission.
In addition, the Association has demonstrated our community’s values in the past year by:
- Offering essential reading on immigration and on the war in Iran, showcasing humanities and social sciences scholarship from more than 55 member presses as resources for understanding, and
- Developing articles that call attention to member presses’ commitment to sharing knowledge widely across disciplines and geographies through translation, as well as to building productive partnerships with university libraries, exemplified by Liverpool University Press, Temple University Press, and Brown University Digital Publishing.
Finally, committed to informing and building communities of university press publishers, scholars, and librarians in an increasingly fragmented social media landscape, the Association has revived its presence on LinkedIn (association-of-university-presses) and continues to be active on Bluesky (@aupresses.bsky.social).
