Does Alliant Press Suggest a Self-Published Future for University Presses?

Last week, Alliant International University (AIU), a private US college announced an intriguing scholarly publishing partnership with Author Solutions, the self-publishing arm of Penguin Random House. Together the two organizations said they were creating Alliant Press, a university press that would be built using Author Solutions infrastructure and be dedicated to publishing “academic works of AIU students, scholars, alumni, staff and other select authors.”

Author Solutions’ official announcement presents this partnership as a “new model of academic publishing,” and it’s certainly innovative from several different points of view. Yet whether it truly does present a model that could be applied more widely across the scholarly publishing sector is open to debate.