From the Director

I am excited to share that we are preparing our first catalog here at Lever Press and we will release it in October! We will be announcing 7 new titles that will come out this academic year. Five of the titles have authors or contributors from Lever Press consortium member campuses. The books range in topic from the resurgence of vinyl to race and class in engineering education. I hope that our first batch of titles helps us promote Lever in a way that gets scholars to understand that we will consider any topic as long as it falls in line with the liberal arts ethos of the Press.

I will be attending the National Women’s Studies Association in November to continue to grow our pipeline in this area. January will be a busy conference month for us. I will be on two panels at the American Historical Association; one on OA publishing with our author Stefan Tanaka and another broadly on monograph publishing. I will also attend the Modern Language Association conference in my capacity as a member of the delegate assembly in a seat that is dedicated to publishing issues in the profession. Our new editor will attend the Society for Classical Studies conference, as it is the same weekend as the AHA. The MLA, SCS, and AHA were held at the same time last year and I somehow made it to all three!

The editorial board is hard at work on revising the description of the editorial agenda so that we can produce new promotional material for fall conferences. We will use this as an opportunity to announce our two new series. Once the promotional card is edited and designed, we will send out copies for use on your own campuses.

Currently, I’m the chair of the Acquisitions Committee for the AUPresses and have put together a webinar on Quality in Peer Review. It took place on September 19 for Peer Review Week. We had participation from journal and book editors and addressed issues related to citation politics, peer review of digital and open access projects, and new forms of review. Our charge this year is to revise the AUPresses Handbook on Best Practices for Peer Review. We are also going to develop an inventory of Good Practice for Editorial Board Governance.

I have invited Cheryl Ball to give a talk on Amherst’s campus during Open Access Week next month. I encourage you to think about how you can promote the work of Lever at your own OA Week events

—Beth Bouloukos, Director of Lever Press