Open Book Publishers - Annual Report 2023

annual report • Dec 19, 2023
http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0246
Laura Rodríguez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3492-5998

Greetings and welcome to our Annual Report!

As we conclude the year, we take immense pride in reflecting on the multitude of exciting events that unfolded at OBP throughout 2023!

From the introduction of new open access titles to receiving awards and engaging in thrilling projects, this year has proven to be truly remarkable for us. Continue reading to discover more!

Announcements

  • Celebrating 15 Years of Knowledge, Innovation, and Open Access!
  • Proud to be in SE's Top 100
  • Book Prizes
  • Our Titles are Now in SCOPUS!
  • Open Book Publishers takes leading role in £5.8 million project to significantly expand open access book infrastructures
  • Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective
  • Open Access Books Network
  • Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report
  • Our Most Accessed Titles (2023)


Books, libraries and content

  • New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors
  • Our 2023 OA Series: Calls for Proposal
  • Blogs and Resources
  • New Library Members

People

  • Our Volunteers
  • New Team Members
  • Support Us!

Celebrating 15 Years of Knowledge, Innovation, and Open Access!


Fifteen years ago, our journey began with a vision for knowledge, innovation, and the fundamental belief in the power of open access. This year, we celebrate this remarkable milestone and express our heartfelt gratitude to each one of you who has been a part of this incredible journey.

Thank you for your unwavering support, enthusiasm, and commitment to advancing scholarship. It's your passion for open access that has driven us to make knowledge more accessible and fostered innovation in ways we couldn't have imagined.

Now live on our website is a new blog post: 15 Years of Open Book Publishers: An Interview with Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti. Dive into this interview, exploring the journey, challenges, and aspirations of our founders as they reflect on the past 15 years and the future of open access.

Here's to the next chapter, where our collective efforts will forge a path toward a more knowledgeable and inclusive world.

Proud to be in SE's Top 100!

We are delighted to announce our inclusion in this year's NatWest SE100 Index, which showcases the most exceptional Social Enterprises in the UK! This marks our fifth consecutive year on the list.This recognition celebrates the growth, impact, and resilience of social ventures across the country, acknowledging the top 100 social enterprises of the year. Further details about this achievement can be found here.

Book Prizes


This year, two of our books have been recognised with prizes for the quality of their scholarship:

The Voice of the Century: The Culture of Italian Bel Canto in Luisa Tetrazzini’s Recorded Interpretationsby Massimo Zicari was the winner of the 2023 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence for Best History in the category Best Historical Research in Classical Music.

Ecocene Politics by Mihnea Tănăsescu is a selected winning title for the 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title! CHOICE commends exceptional works for their excellence and scholarly impact.

Our Titles are Now in SCOPUS!

All our published books are now listed in the SCOPUS  abstract and citation database, showcasing enriched data and linked scholarly literature across a wide variety of disciplines.

Furthermore, we assure you that forthcoming titles will be promptly included in the database shortly after their release.

Open Book Publishers takes leading role in £5.8 million project to significantly expand open access book infrastructures


Open Book Publishers (OBP) is playing a key role in the Open Book Futures (OBF) initiative, a £5.8 million project funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund. Led by Lancaster University, OBF aims to enhance community-owned Open Access (OA) book publishing infrastructures. Building on the COPIM project, OBP will expand Thoth metadata management and the Thoth Archiving Network. The initiative, guided by 'Scaling Small' principles, will be led by OBP's co-director Rupert Gatti and involve outreach efforts by Lucy Barnes, and software development by Javier Arias, Ross Higman and Brendan O'Connell. OBF will run from May 2023 to April 2026, fostering inclusivity globally and engaging with diverse partners and linguistic contexts. OBP, along with COPIM partners and new collaborators, will contribute to this transformative endeavor, fostering open access, collaboration, and diversity in scholarly publishing.


OBP co-director Rupert Gatti said,

OBP is hugely excited to continue developing the infrastructure that will support inclusive, non-commercial and community-owned OA book publishing, guided by the principles of collaboration and openness that have animated the COPIM project and that will continue to thrive within Open Book Futures. Having created the basic underlying infrastructures within COPIM, this grant enables us to significantly expand and develop that framework in order to support small and medium-sized open access book publishers globally, preserving the diversity and scholarly independence of book publishing while making its output open for all.’

Read more at https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/open-book-publishers-takes-leading-role-in-project-to-significantly-expand-open-access-book-infrastructures/

Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective


Almost a year has passed since we officially announced that we had joined the Open Book Collective (OBC). Since then, over 30 current library members have decided to renew their Open Book Publishers Membership via the collective and support a fairer OA book publishing ecosystem. We have also welcomed new library members that have kindly decided to support OBP via the collective. To both current and new members - THANK YOU!

The Open Book Collective has been developed by Copim, an international partnership funded by Research England and Arcadia Fund. COPIM is building non-profit, community-owned infrastructure to support a resilient future for open access book publishing that enables smaller and more community-focused presses to thrive and multiply.

If you are a library member and would like to find out more about the collective or renew through them, contact our Marketing and Library Relations Officer, Laura Rodriguez, at laura@openbookpublishers.com.

We would also like to invite you to read our official announcement where we explain why we’re joining the Collective and what this will mean for libraries (including our current Library Members), our authors and our readers.

Open Access Books Network


This year the OABN, jointly coordinated by Lucy Barnes of Open Book Publishers and Silke Davison of OAPEN, held a number of events, including as part of our collaboration on the PALOMERA project on policymaking for OA books. We published blog posts on topics including metadata for OA books and platforms publishers use for OA books, and we surveyed our membership to plan our future direction: explore what we found out and how we are responding. We are currently planning a wealth of new activities and resources for 2024 – join our mailing list to stay updated!

Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report

Global Geographical Statistics


Our Open Access titles can be accessed through various platforms, providing readers with multiple avenues to explore our content. The compilation of usage statistics for our books poses a challenge, and it is evident that any reported data represents a conservative estimate of the actual usage. Due to the unavailability of data from some platforms, the figures may be at the lower end of the true usage spectrum.

Presented below are our global geographical statistics for the year 2023, showcasing that readers from every country, state, and territory around the world have engaged with our titles. This confirms the widespread global reach of our publications.

In the landscape of our readership, North America, Europe, and Asia emerge as the primary contributors in 2023, solidifying their positions at the top tier. Following closely are Africa, Oceania, and South America, each playing a crucial role in our  community. Looking forward, we are committed to increasing our global influence, fostering a deeper connection with readers worldwide in the coming years.

In the global landscape of readership, discernible patterns emerge across countries. The United States of America leads with a substantial readership, followed by the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and Canada. Noteworthy engagement can also be seen in Russia, France, the Philippines, and China. Further contributing to the readership spectrum are the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Ireland, and Spain as well as Singapore, Finland, Nigeria, Indonesia, and South Africa.

This year's readership shows the diverse and widespread impact of our books on a global scale!

Below you can find the full map of readership by country:

Annual Readership by Measure Report

We are proud to say this year, we have received 896,129 accesses from the various platforms below!

Please be advised that access to our books in HTML format has been tracked until July 2023. Unfortunately, the platform we relied on for recording this information is no longer available. Our dedicated developers at OBP are actively exploring solutions to address this issue promptly.

We are able to record different types of usage across certain platforms, which can tell us, for each platform: how much a book is being used there (according to the platform’s own choice of measurement); in which formats; over time; where in the world it is being accessed from (in some cases); and to what extent it is being accessed from particular domains (which is valuable to our Library Members wishing to see how much their students and staff are taking advantage of the Membership).

However, please remember that this is by no means a complete picture. Our books can be downloaded from many sites where we don’t receive any usage reports  and our geographical data is limited by certain platforms or individuals choosing to block the collection of such information (we specify on our maps the percentage of the book’s total statistics for which we have geographical data). Once a book has been downloaded, we don’t track how that file is used and shared (in this respect, download figures are similar to sales figures for hard copies and ebook editions).
To find out more about the data we have been collecting and how the process of retrieving this information works, please visit our page on how we collect our readership statistics.

As always, thank you so much for accessing, reading and sharing our titles. It is thanks to the support shown by our readers, our member libraries and our authors that we can keep working towards a fairer publishing landscape!

Our Most Accessed Titles (2023)


Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University by Stephen Siklos

Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher  

Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe by Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari (eds)

Transforming Conservation: A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making by William J. Sutherland (ed.)

Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers: A Primer for the Non-English Speaker by Gábor Lövei

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin (eds)

The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition by Edward Pettit

The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000 by Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal and  Andrew Tompkins (eds)

Models in Microeconomic Theory: Expanded Second Edition by Martin J. Osborne and  Ariel Rubinstein

Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa by John W. Wilson and Richard B. Primack

Arab Media Systems by Carola Richter and Claudia Kozman

New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors


This year we have published a total of 46 books! We have released 33 fantastic new OA titles from first-time OBP authors:



And we are delighted to announce that we have also published 13 new high-quality Open Access titles written/edited by returning authors and editors who have published one or more books with us in the past:


Thanks to all our authors for deciding to publish with us - it's our privilege to work with you!

Our 2023 OA Series: Call for Proposals


As you may know, we have various Open Access series all of which are open for proposals, so feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is interested in submitting a proposal!

Global Communications
Global Communications is a new book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.

St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.

Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.

The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.

The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.

Applied Theatre Praxis
This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.

Digital Humanities
Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.

Blogs, Videos and Resources
Blogs


Dire Straits-Education Reforms: Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence by Montserrat Gomendio and José Ignacio Wert
Teaching European History in the 21st Century by Emma Johnson and Jochen Hung
Susan Isaacs: Second Edition by Philip Graham
Stories [that] Matter: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europeby Ladan Rahbari & Olga Burlyuk
Reading about Palestine after Tom Hurndall by Ian Parker
The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art by Joanna Page
From Handwriting to Footprinting : Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisisby Anne Baillot
On 'Breaking Conventions: Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century'by Patricia Auspos
Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850 by John Claiborne Isbell
Joys and sorrows of the noble art of academic writing - a survival manual by Maria Teresa Renzi Sepe
William Moorcroft, potter: Individuality by design by Jonathan Mallinson
A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: The Functionalist Symbolic Reference of UK Governance Models by Basem Adi
Diachronic variation in the Omani Arabic vernacular of the al-‘Awabi district. From Carl Reinhardt (1894) to the present day by Roberta Morano
On 'William Moorcroft, Potter: Individuality by Design' by Alex Carabine
Changing the conversation around Existential Risk by Dr SJ Beard
A39 Theatre Group and the fight not to be where we have come to beby Paul Farmer
Decorative Art Without Barriers: William Moorcroft's Pottery Explored via Open Access Publishing by Jonathan Mallinson
Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: The Heart of Open Access by James Hutson
The Predatory Paradox: misinformation, fake news and clickbait in academic publishingby Anja Pritchard
Misunderstandings by Shauna Hagan
How can you read a novel in hundreds of translations? (and why would you want to?) by Matthew Reynolds
The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing by Amy Koerber
A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach by Basem Adi
A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice - The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social by Basem Adi


Resources

[video] Open Access Week 2023 - A conversation with authors John W. Wilson, Richard B. Primack and Eric Nana
[video] 'The Predatory Paradox' - An interview with Amy Koerber
[video] Online Book Launch: 'William Moorcroft, Potter: Individuality by Design'
[video] Paul Farmer - After the Miners’ Strike: A39 and Cornish Political Theatre versus Thatcher’s Britain
[video] Author John Claiborne Isbell on his book 'Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850'
[video] 'Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island' - An Interview with author Lee Haring
[video] Book Launch: 'Chance Encounters: A Bioethics for a Damaged Planet''
[video] Dire Straits-Education Reforms' - An Interview with Montserrat Gomendio and José Ignacio Wert

[video series] The audiovisual resources supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process created for our Open Access title Documentary Making for Digital Humanists are now available here.

[video series] Dive into the world of literary exploration with our curated playlist featuring the authors of 'Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages.' Join the minds behind this book as they delve into the intricacies of their essays, offering a thought-provoking journey through the prism of languages and cultures that shape Charlotte Brontë's timeless classic.

[podcast] Mihnea Tanasescu on the Need for 'Ecocene Politics'

[audio]Podcast - From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis

[audio] Podcast - New Books in Sociology: Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe

[article] PISA: Mission Failure: With so much evidence from student testing, why do education systems continue to struggle? Read this article by author Montse Gomendio

[article] La reforma imposible de la educación

[article] Towards a history education for the 21st Century: An interview with Dr. Jochen Hung

[substack] Researching Misunderstandings

New Library Members

Since January 2023, 34 new libraries have become members, thus supporting our OA mission of providing academic research free of charge to everyone, everywhere in the world.


You can find the full list of current members here and the list of benefits here. Membership for libraries in Economically Developing Countries is free of charge. If you are a librarian at a university or library in such a country, and would be interested in receiving more information on how to become a member, please contact us at libraries@openbookpublishers.com


We are very grateful for the support our member libraries give us, and we are keen to find out what more we could be doing in return so please, do not hesitate to contact us at libraries@openbookpublishers.com if you would like to share your suggestions or comments on how we can improve.


Thanks to all the institutions that have decided to join us this year as well as those that have renewed their membership from previous years -  the  support we receive from libraries is vital to help us continue our work!

Our Volunteers


We offer training placements in all aspects of Open Access publishing, free of charge. In the past we have provided placements as part of university courses (such as the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, the Master in Publishing at City University of London), work placements (School of Arts, Birbeck, University of London) and to other Open Access publishers, such as UGA Editions and Firenze University Press. Placements usually cover editorial skills, marketing, or technical aspects such as the creation of XML editions. For more information or to discuss a possible placement, please contact Alessandra Tosi.

However, we also welcome volunteers of different levels of skill and  experience who want to work with us. This 2023 we have had the pleasure of working along some great volunteers and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for all their help and hard work - we strongly appreciated their support and  assistance!

Thea Phillips
Peio Pinuaga Arriaga
Emma Carter
Annie Hine
Sara Harris
Sacha Tanna
Caitlin Broadie
Michaela Buna
Cecilia Thon
Almudena Jimenez Virosta
Evie Rowan
Elisabeth Pitts
Maria Teresa Renzi-Sepe
Alex Carabine
Maria Eydmans
Jeremy Bowman
James Hobson
Evie Rowan
Debbie Lee
Anja Pritchard
Shauna Hagan
Katie Stevens

If you or someone you know would like to have the opportunity to try a range of key publishing aspects, including marketing, editorial and text-formatting tasks in a non-corporate environment, please contact Alessandra Tosi.

New Team Members


This year we welcomed three new team members:

Book Production, Digital Product Development and Illustration Management
Cameron Craig: Cameron Craig has worked as a graphic designer for more than 25 years. He is responsible for typesetting and producing the print and digital editions of our titles.

Editorial
Jen Moriarty: Jen Moriarty holds postgraduate degrees in both Publishing and Victorian Studies. Most recently, she completed a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on nineteenth-century Protestant eschatological reforms. She is responsible for editorial and production tasks at OBP.

Software Engineering
Brendan O'Connell: Brendan O’Connell is a software engineer at OBP working on Thoth. He previously worked in academic libraries in roles at the intersection of teaching and technology. He holds a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We are delighted to have Cameron, Jen and Brendan onboard - welcome!

Support Us!


If you believe that knowledge should be freely available to everyone, you can support Open Book Publishers with a donation! Any level of support will go towards the publication of Open Access books with no charges for authors or readers.  

Donate here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/support-us

Laura Rodríguez

Laura Rodríguez holds an MPhil in Medieval Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include medieval pastoral care, women's studies, religious history, and cycle drama.

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