The university presses in the context of the Brazilian public higher education

Abstract Addresses the Brazilian federal and state university presses as environments associated to the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The advance of new Information and Communication Technologies is influencing the editorial production, promoting innovations in all the stages of the production chain of the book. The aim is to bring an analysis of the performance of university presses in the context of the Brazilian public higher education. The methodology involved a quantitative approach and the selected population consists of 47 managers of university presses, from which it was obtained 16 answered questionnaires. In the data collection, was used an electronic questionnaire (Google Docs), with open and closed questions, sent by e-mail, from February 18 to March 18, 2016. The results show that some university presses are organized to attend the demands for publication of informational resources, and others, are gradually entering the electronic publishing scenario, by means of innovations provided by the new Information and Communication Technologies. These data allow those interested in the topic to observe, make comparisons and adaptations to implant or implement new publishers, based on the experience of the researched presses.