Barbara Kline Pope, a leader in academic publishing who has dedicated her career to sharing high-quality research as widely as possible, has decided to retire from her role as executive director of Johns Hopkins University Press effective Feb. 1, 2027, university leaders announced today.
Image caption: Barbara Kline Pope
Since her arrival in 2017, Pope has steered Hopkins Press, the nation's first university press, through a complex era for academic publishing characterized by industrywide consolidation, shrinking higher education budgets, and the challenges and opportunities associated with the growth of artificial intelligence.
"Barbara has led the Press with vision, passion, and profound dedication to the cause of scholarly publishing," JHU President Ron Daniels and Interim Provost Lainie Rutkow wrote in a message to the Hopkins community today.
"Throughout the last nine years, Barbara's tenure at the helm of JHUP has truly embodied the Hopkins ethos of bringing the benefits of discovery to the world."
Hopkins Press, founded in 1878, operates a uniquely diverse portfolio of four interconnected publishing businesses. With one of the largest journal programs of any American university press, it publishes 120 journals and manages membership for 27 scholarly and professional associations and societies. Over her nine-year tenure, Pope oversaw the growth of the journal program by nearly 30%.
The Press also boasts a leading books division that publishes 120 new books each year and maintains a backlist of more than 3,500 titles, and a division that distributes books for 18 esteemed university presses. Hopkins Press is also home to Project MUSE, a highly trusted and widely used massive online scholarship collection that is the leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content.
Under Pope's leadership, Project MUSE has pioneered a sustainable and equitable model of open-access academic publishing dedicated to making high-quality, peer-reviewed research broadly accessible. In 2021, Project MUSE received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Public Knowledge Program to study "Subscribe to Open," an innovative business model for equitable open-access journal publishing. In 2025, the new program launched with an inaugural open-access offering of more than 100 journals from 27 nonprofit publishers.
More recently, Pope has helped facilitate the landmark integration of the Press and BioOne, a nonprofit biological science aggregator whose collection of more than 200 esteemed journals and hundreds of books complements Project MUSE's range. At the same time, she has embraced the rise of generative AI, taking advantage of its ability to produce efficiencies in the publishing workflow and stewarding authors' work in the LLM landscape. She also co-founded—along with Denis Wirtz, JHU's vice provost for research—the Wavelengths series of books, in which leading Hopkins faculty share their expertise with broad public audiences. And she has stewarded historians Andrew Jewett's and Jonathan Strassfeld's Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years, the first single-volume history of the entire institution, which will be published by the Press this fall as the university's sesquicentennial year draws to a close.
"It's been a privilege to have led such a historic press at a university that has one eye toward that history but another one toward deep and creative innovation," Pope said. "There's an energy and culture here that allows each of us to reach higher. Cultivating that culture at the Press and creating an inclusive environment for all our staff that focuses on learning and on honoring others' dignity has been one of the greatest joys of my career."
Pope came to Hopkins Press having honed her managerial acumen and mission commitment to scholarly publishing through 34 years of experience at the National Academies Press, the publishing program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, serving as its executive director from 1997 to 2017 and steering its traditional print model through an era of digital innovation. She also served as president of the Association of University Presses and sat on the management board at MIT Press.
Information on a search for Pope's successor will be shared in the coming weeks, Daniels and Rutkow wrote.
"The breadth and depth of Barbara's insight and expertise have successfully stewarded JHUP's full portfolio," they wrote. "Barbara has led JHUP with innovation, integrity, and compassion, and she leaves the Press well positioned to continue to grow and flourish in the years ahead."
