Oxford University Press is expected to announce redundancies as part of an overhaul of the English Language Teaching (ELT) division. OUP could not confirm how many jobs are expected to be lost in the process.
OUP spokesperson Dan Selinger told Cherwell the review “was designed to assess the external competitive environment, and to explore ways in which the ELT Division can continue to meet the changing needs of teachers and learners across the world.”
OUP are currently engaged in a consultation period regarding the redundancies, and the reorganisation process began in late February.
Selinger continued, “New roles will be created, others may change, and some current roles will no longer exist.”
OUP communications director Rachel Goode said that the redundancies are part of a modernisation procedure. She told the Oxford Mail, “our current structure within ELT dates back to the 1990s. We need to change in order to respond to the changing demands of our customers.”
According to the OUP website, the ELT section is “responding well” to recent demand for digital resources. It states that all its courses “now include integrated digital components, and a growing number of its titles are available as apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.”
OUP is a department of the University of Oxford and has branches on every continent. It is reportedly the largest university press in the world; it produced more than 3500 academic titles last year, and employs around 6000 people globally.
OUP posted £106 million in net, post-tax profits for the 2012 financial year, down from £112.2 million in 2011 but a significant improvement on the 2010 figure of £90.4 million. In 2012, it contributed £54 million for the university finances.
The confirmation of job losses comes as Oxford and Cambridge university presses and publishers Taylor & Francis face controversy over efforts to sue Delhi University for producing ‘course packs’ using extracts from their publications. 309 academics have signed an open letter to the publishers expressing concern at the move.
According to Indian newspaper The Hindu, the letter stated that “we would like to place on record our distress at this act of the publishers, as we recognize the fact that in a country like India marked by sharp economic inequalities, it is often not possible for every student to obtain a personal copy of a book.”
Thomas Metcalf, Emeritus Professor at the University of California, and an academic whose work has been reproduced in Delhi, wrote he is “happy to accept smaller royalties on sales of my books to widen the audience, especially in a developing country such as India”.
The Publisher’s Association has acknowledged that course packs like those reproduced in Delhi play an important role in providing affordable study materials to students in less developed countries. It expressed its desire for legal copies to be obtained from the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization, where a copyright tariff is levied.
In a statement, the Association said “it is vital that those creating coursepacks act within the legal framework which supports the production of high quality educational content. Through this court case we have sought to challenge the illegal duplication of copyrighted materials for sale by a commercial photocopying shop.”
One first-year historian said, “It seems ridiculous that a profitable company is going to have to lay off staff, when its top brass are almost certainly on fairly large salaries. These will simply be more bodies to add to the mass of skilled workers who will now find themselves jobless.”
