Abstract
In the context of the 2020 public health crisis that discourages exchanges of physical objects in society, university-led publishing needed to rethink its operations. Worldwide the opening of quality scholarly content proved to be a solution. University presses reacted rapidly and offered books according to the open access model. The present research aimed to map the editorial landscape of Romanian university presses, to identify the main features displayed online by the university presses parented by public universities and to highlight the readiness of these players to further open access academic books, especially in the time of the COVID-19 crisis. The quantitative approach investigated the availability of e-books in the university presses’ portfolios, including the alignment to the open access scholarship movement, the use of social media accounts to promote the presses and the response of the presses to the challenges of the health crisis. Out of the 46 active university presses, only six had open book titles in their portfolios and only one genuinely responded actively to the challenges posed by the need for electronic formats in 2020. Unless Romanian university presses modernize and restructure their modus operandi, they can prove irrelevant in the post-crisis period.
Highlights
The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic early in 2020 created a huge global disruption in all aspects of social life
We focused on university presses parented by public universities because they are the unequivocal signals that higher education institutions fulfill their research mission and are places of producing, transferring and disseminating knowledge
Four universities do not have their own press, and 5 universities declare that they have a press, but it is not visible through a website
Summary
The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic ( known as the COVID-19 pandemic) early in 2020 created a huge global disruption in all aspects of social life. According to UNESCO, approximately 72.9 percent of the world’s learner population, enrolled in schools, universities and colleges, was affected by the lockdown [2] and had to adjust to the restrictions to physical spaces of educational purposes, such as classrooms, laboratories, libraries and/or bookstores. In this context, educational publishers from all continents recognized the right moment to step forward and support homeschooling, learning and research in a variety of ways
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