Cornell University Press has been awarded a $78,000 planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct a feasibility study and produce a business plan for a new scholarly publishing services organization.

The study will define and model a suite of services designed to support the increasing number of scholarly publishers that are striving to develop innovative products and programs enabled by digital publishing technologies.

University presses and other not-for-profit scholarly publishers generally rely on either a diffuse network of individual consultants or complex organizations that conduct research and produce industry-focused reports. Neither option is adequate to the challenges facing scholarly publishers and the system of scholarly communications today, according to John Ackerman, director of Cornell University Press. The proposed organization will be designed from the ground up to address these demands.

Specific services offered or brokered would include concept and grant proposal development, designing project portfolio strategies, evaluating project performance and analytics, implementing market entry strategies and providing indirect long-term stewardship of enterprise-scale projects.

Work on the study and business plan will be conducted this year.