The University of Cincinnati announced on Thursday that the University of Cincinnati Press will shut down on June 25. In a release, the university said that it had "determined that the long-term financial sustainment of the University of Cincinnati Press is not feasible. Funding resources, including start-up funds, have been exhausted and the press is not in a self-sustaining financial position.”
UCP’s list of scholarly books in print and digital formats will by transferred to the University of Minnesota Press as of July 1. Regional titles, including the forthcoming Thinking About Ohio series, will be transferred to Ohio University Press on the same date. Inventory and fulfillment services will continue to be managed by Chicago Distribution Center. The University of Cincinnati’s Libraries will continue to offer library publishing services for faculty authors of open access books, journals and proceedings.
UCP was founded in 2017 and has published close to 50 books, 30% of which are open access publications, as well as seven academic journals. Director and acquiring editor Elizabeth Scarpelli, who founded the press, expressed disappointment in the university’s decision, noting that the press had been launched with the intention of “being different, with more open access” publications. The university had placed the press under the oversight of the University of Cincinnati Libraries, and had provided only five years of funding. “That was supposed to take care of everything,” Scarpelli said. “There was no consideration for how the press would continue after those five years. The assumption is that we would find supplemental funding elsewhere, but there was no conversation about it.”
Scarpelli is being laid off at the end of June, as are press's design/production editor and digital publisher. Two student work-study positions at the press are also being eliminated.
“The press could have been kept open with $200,000 to $300,000,” Scarpelli said, lamenting that because there isn’t a deep backlist, the press does not have the same degree of support from scholars and other readers as did other embattled university presses that staved off closure. “It’s not a tremendous amount of money.”
