From mission to marketa case study and analysis of the commercialisation of institutional publishing

In June 2025, screenshots spread across academic social media announcing that Amsterdam University Press had been folded into the Taylor and Francis family. The confusion was real. AUP's clarifying statement on June twelfth revealed that only its English-language book list had been sold, while Dutch books and journals would remain separate. Then came the walkout. Sanders, Barnes, Grady, Hopkins, and Hughes report that series editors resigned, noting that none of the authors or editors had been consulted about the deal. The press had continued operating like a university press. Nobody told it to stop. That last detail matters. It points to the deeper question Sanders and colleagues are really asking: what does a university press identity actually mean, and how fragile is it? The easy answer is that commercial equals bad and non-profit equals good. The paper dismantles that. University presses already operate inside market logic. They evaluate the economic potential of manuscripts, and libraries have long been, in the authors' own words, "skilled at finding the funds to pay for ever escalating ransom notes." AUP itself was sold in 2019 after being held within UvA Ventures, a holding company of which the University of Amsterdam is the sole shareholder. UvA Ventures concluded it had not succeeded in turning AUP into a profitable company. University ownership didn't protect it. Neither did non-profit status shield CEU Press from needing a new funding model, though CEU found one through Copim's Opening the Future program. This program has funded around sixty open-access titles since 2020 by having libraries subscribe to backlist packages. The brand signal is what's really at stake. When a university name appears on a press, readers and authors assume it stands above ordinary market pressures. That assumption can be weaponized. After the Taylor and Francis deal, some AUP books originally issued under open Creative Commons licenses turned up on closed platforms. The brand remained, but the commitment behind it didn't. Sanders and colleagues argue that governance is the actual safeguard — not the brand label, not even the university affiliation. They point to the Open Book Collective, which gives libraries a meaningful share in its own governance, and to memoranda of understanding used in Copim's work as binding, transparent commitments between presses and their communities. What enabled the AUP sale to proceed with so little scrutiny was opacity — a vacuum, as the authors put it, that only resolved itself weeks later. The fix is participatory governance and authors who understand their own contract rights well enough to act on them. Cambridge University Press transferred sixty-three point seven million pounds to its university in 2024. The money flows. The question is who decides where it goes, and whether the people who built the scholarship have any say in that decision. The Stockholm Declaration calls on academia to resume control of publishing. Sanders and colleagues are making the case that governance structures — community-led, transparent, and binding — are how that actually happens. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.