Managing a university press: a guide to the real work after founding

Founding a university press in Türkiye is, on paper, a well-defined task: a senate decision, a publishing regulation, a publication committee, a publisher’s certificate. Guides for those steps abound. What gets talked about far less is what comes after — the press ceasing to be a “unit” and becoming a functioning institution.

This post is for that second phase: the real agenda items facing a university press that has completed its founding — or has been publishing in practice for years — and now wants to settle its operations.

Agenda 1: Turning regulations into workflows

Regulations say what shall be done; they do not say how it runs. The sentence “Submissions shall be evaluated by the publication committee” produces dozens of practical questions: which form takes the submission in? Who checks completeness? How many reviewers, chosen how? How are committee votes collected, and what happens on a tie? Which template is the decision written on?

If the answers to these questions live in people’s memories, the press is refounded with every staff change. Turning the answers into written workflows — ideally workflows defined in software — is the first big job of the post-founding phase. One tip: the “three decisions” discipline simplifies the design; if the options at every step can be reduced to the trio advance / request revision / reject, the flow is clean.

Agenda 2: Putting committee and board work on the record

The distinguishing institution of university publishing is the publication committee — and it is also the most fragile point: meetings get interrupted, files pass from hand to hand, votes are collected by email, the minutes get written afterwards. When an objection comes — in academia it comes — someone goes hunting for the paperwork behind “how was that decision made?”

Running committee evaluation on the system, with member-level votes and automatic minutes, brings both speed and defensibility. Clarity of the voting rule matters too: an odd number of members, a majority rule defined in advance, inconclusive splits ruled out from the start. The decision authority belongs to the committee; the system’s job is to make the decision possible, fast, and documented.

Agenda 3: ISBNs, certificates, and the calendar of official obligations

The publisher’s certificate has an expiry date; ISBN applications run through the Ministry’s system (ekygm.gov.tr, Türkiye’s official publication-standards portal); then there are banderole obligations and legal-deposit copies… Individually these are small tasks; forgotten, they are large problems. (For the detailed process, see our ISBN and banderole guide.)

Practical advice: tie the official obligations to an “institutional calendar” and give the reminders to the system, not to people. The certificate renewal date should be remembered by the institution’s infrastructure, not by somebody’s diary.

Agenda 4: Owning sales and access

The classic weakness of university presses is being meticulous in production and timid in distribution. The book is printed, enters the warehouse, and there it is “provided to whoever asks.” Yet the accessibility of knowledge produced with public funds is part of the press’s reason for existing.

Today’s minimum standard is clear: a store on the institution’s own domain, live-linked to the catalog, able to offer print and digital together; free access to open-access publications; ordering for libraries and individuals alike. International data shows that revenue in university publishing still comes overwhelmingly from print sales; owning sales is not commercialization, it is sustainability. (How open access and sales live side by side, we have written about separately.)

Agenda 5: Not severing the financial side from the academic side

Sales running through the revolving fund or the foundation’s commercial enterprise, royalty payouts, printers’ invoices… In university presses, financial records are usually kept in an accounting office completely cut off from the publishing workflows. The price of the disconnect is an operation in which neither side can see the other: the publishing side does not know which book has paid for itself; the financial side does not know which work a stock movement belongs to.

The sales-invoice-stock-royalty chain flowing through a single record is the key here too; the “month-end reconciliation” shift gives way to a picture that is current at any moment.

Agenda 5.5: Not leaving visibility to chance

Related to sales but a heading of its own: discoverability. University press catalogs contain books that are the only Turkish-language source in their field — and nobody who does not type the book’s exact title into a search engine will ever reach them. Labor staying invisible like this is the quiet waste of public publishing.

The minimum visibility package has three items: a permanent page of its own for every book and journal (a real, indexable page, not a list of PDFs); proper metadata on those pages — author, abstract, ISBN, subject headings; and a regular channel where the institution announces its publishing news. None of this requires an advertising budget; what it requires is an infrastructure in which the catalog flows to the web automatically. In a setup where a new publication reaches the shop window by someone manually “creating a page,” visibility is always late; in a storefront that lives with the catalog, a published work is findable the hour it is published.

Agenda 6: Moving institutional memory from people to the institution

University assignments rotate: the publications coordinator returns to a teaching load, the specialist is posted to another unit. If the press’s memory — which work is at which stage, the reviewer pool, the contracts, past decisions — travels with individuals, every rotation is a small refounding.

The only lasting cure is memory accumulating in the system: every work’s timeline, every decision’s record, every document’s place. Learning the job, for the newcomer, should mean reading the record — not tracking down a predecessor to ask.

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The common denominator of these six agenda items will have been noticed: none is solved by “working harder”; all of them demand structure. We designed Nasirus for exactly this structural need of university presses — from committee voting to the store, from ISBN records to royalty payouts, in one system. Bring your own regulation and let’s turn it into a workflow together in a demo — that exercise turns out to be the most instructive one there is.