University Presses as Ecosystem Builders: Strategic Positioning for Industry–Education Integration under China's New Development Pattern

Under the new development paradigm, integration of industry and education is framed as a key measure for enabling higher education to adapt to national strategic demand and for deepening the coupling between talent cultivation and industrial upgrading. This article examines the strategic positioning of university presses within that agenda and argues that presses cannot remain confined to a narrowly defined role as "campus publishing units". Instead, they must enact a positioning shift toward serving the construction of an industry–education integration ecosystem. The paper builds its argument through a dual emphasis on structural advantage and structural challenge. On the advantage side, it positions university presses as an important component of the higher education system, with distinctive resources that are difficult to replicate elsewhere. These resources include their proximity to higher-education teaching and knowledge production, and their institutional role in developing and optimizing teaching content within universities. The article suggests that such proximity produces a comparative advantage in translating educational objectives into structured teaching content systems. In addition, the paper frames university presses as having an inherent "knowledge service" attribute that can accelerate the transformation of knowledge within the industry–education integration process, by acting as a hub that connects university teaching goals, research innovation, and practical industrial needs. On the challenge side, the paper describes multiple pressures that emerge when the integration of industry, education, and research becomes a mainstream direction of transformation. It highlights that legacy publishing models lag behind the pace and policy orientation of industry–education integration; that digital and intelligent transformation in publishing demands an upgraded mode of knowledge service; and that university presses often occupy a marginal position in the concrete implementation of industry–education integration projects due to the absence of efficient mechanisms and systems. In this diagnosis, marginalization is not framed as a problem of recognition alone but as an institutional and operational mismatch. The article then proposes a repositioning framework with three linked action domains. First, it calls for the output of a modernized teaching content system centered on capability cultivation. Here, the emphasis is on "capability orientation" rather than mere textbook supply, implying that teaching content needs reconstruction to support applied and vocational undergraduate reforms that demand updates in curricular content and teaching mode. Second, it calls for digital-intelligent enablement of teaching-scenario innovation and knowledge-service upgrading. University presses should move beyond the traditional textbook publisher role and proactively act as designers of digital educational resources, builders of intelligent teaching platforms, and providers of high-quality knowledge services suited to new scenarios, new platforms, and new services. Third, it calls for the formation of an open, collaborative educational field through multi-community building. The paper foregrounds community building as the lever for activating collaborative efficiency, emphasizing organizational ecology, operational mechanisms, and value networks as the structural dimensions through which ecosystem-level coordination becomes sustainable. The article concludes that only through this positioning transformation can university presses provide durable publishing power for high-quality education development under the industry–education integration agenda.