December 2025 Newsletter
Welcome to our December Newsletter!
We hope this newsletter finds you well as the festive month of December begins. We write with a big announcement about our new individual membership programme, news of recent publications, and a review of some of the highlights of our year.
Support OBP: new membership programme!
We’re excited to share that our new individual membership programme is now live on Patreon—and we’d love for you to join us! Making high-quality, peer-reviewed academic research freely available has never mattered more. This year alone, we’ve released more than sixty open access books without charging authors mandatory fees.
If you’d like to support our work, you can now join one of our five new monthly membership tiers—ranging from £1 to £50. Members enjoy great perks: including free EPUBs of our latest books, discounts on print editions, access to our annual online conference, updates on open access developments, and invitations to exclusive conversations with our publishing team.
Most importantly, you’ll be helping to fuel our open access mission—just like the libraries in our library membership programme—making high-quality scholarly research freely available to readers everywhere.
Find out more and join our individual membership programme.
Here's what happened this year:
Sixty-four new books this year, including TEN in November:
Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta (the first title in our new series in partnership with the Philological Society).
Hylo Narrans: Echoes of Material Marronage by Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn.
Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink & Laura Karreman.
Xouth, The Ape: A Tale of Manners by Iakovos Pitsipios & Neo G. Christodoulides.
Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics by Samuel Bowles & Weikai Chen.
The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East by Alba Fedeli, Geoffrey Khan & Johan Lundberg.
A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment by Charles Webster.
A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells.
Joyce’s Choices: New Textual Parallels in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and ‘Ulysses' by R. H. Winnick.
Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt by Linda Herrera.
And we have continued this activity in December, publishing several new titles:
Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty's Constructive Project edited by Elin D. Huckerby and Marianne Janack
More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition ― 2025 European Public Investment Outlook edited by Floriana Cerniglia and Francesco Saraceno.
Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma by Maria Manuel Lisboa.
All of our titles are free to read and download; we invite you to explore our complete catalogue.
Thank you: to our peer reviewers and our volunteers
Every year, our publications are made possible thanks to the committed and generous work of the referees who review the manuscripts we receive. This includes those manuscripts we ultimately do not publish, as well as those whose release is announced in these newsletters. This year, an incredible 150 experts peer-reviewed our book manuscripts, and we thank all of our referees for their invaluable contributions. Some of our referees choose to be named, and we then share their names with the relevant author and include them in the published book. Since May of this year, we have begun recording their names on our website and you can view them there.
We also sincerely thank the five volunteers who have helped us with a range of editorial, production and marketing tasks in 2025: Hannah Bergin, Sophia Bursey; Tricia De Souza; Lila Fierek; and Elisabeth Pitts. We are very grateful to them for their work. You can view their names on our website along with those of volunteers from previous years.
Warm thanks to them all!
Three new series partnerships!
The recently published Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta is the first book in our Publications of the Philological Society series, published in partnership with the Philological Society (PhilSoc), the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages.
This is one of three new series partnerships we announced this year: the other two are Papers of the British School at Rome in partnership with the British School at Rome, which will showcase original research and creative work on Italy from prehistory to the present; and Politics & Fiction in partnership with the CAPONEU Consortium, a multilingual series that will explore what ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ mean in relation to fictions as found in literature, theatre, performance, poetry, film and visual art, and cultural production as a whole.
We are immensely proud to begin bringing this work to a global audience via open access. If you want to know more about partnering with us to publish a series, you can find out more on our website or contact our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi.
Prize awards & nominations for our books
Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould were awarded the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize for their chapter, 'The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran' in Prismatic Jane Eyre, edited by Matthew Reynolds, which shows how Iranian readers incorporated Bronte's novel into their understandings of love.
This year, three of our authors were shortlisted for the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies categories. They were:
Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print traces the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500, dismembered in the nineteenth century & now reconstructed via Rudy's research.
Joanna Page, Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art shows how contemporary artists in Latin America reinvent older methods of collecting and displaying nature to create new aesthetic and political perspectives.
Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, a 6-volume study exploring a single, electrifying story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem to its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Michael Hughes was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography prize for his book, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life, a biography of a hitherto neglected Russian revolutionary figure.
Luke Clossey received an honourable mention from the judges of the Phyllis Goodheart Gordon book prize for the best book in Renaissance Studies for his work, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520, a sweeping and unconventional investigation of Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history.
And finally Sandra Abegglen and her co-editors were nominated for an OEGlobal Open Education Award for Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education, a collection of essays that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future.
Enormous congratulations to these authors for this recognition of their fine research and writing. We are proud to publish and celebrate their work, and we are also delighted that through these awards and nominations we could fly the flag for independent open access presses: we are honoured to represent this growing community.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Building open access networks & infrastructures in 2025
Highlights from the Open Access Books Network (OABN), which we coordinate in partnership with OAPEN, Sparc Europe and OPERAS, included:
- The OABN published an FAQ and blog post based on an expert webinar that focused on including third-party materials in open access books;
- Three authors who received ERC grants shared their experiences of publishing open access books and series;
- The OABN held an expert webinar on good metadata practice for open access publishers;
- It held two events focused on policymaking for open access books, including services for policymaking and a community event on contributing to the PALOMERA Knowledge Base.
Highlights from the Copim Open Book Futures project, building non-commercial infrastructure to develop open access book publishing, included:
- Thoth Open Metadata was nominated for the 2025 ALPSP Innovation Award and is set to release a significant upgrade early next year;
- Copim's Accessibility work package released its accessibility guide for open access book publishers, including a section on accessibility for librarians;
- Copim Compass was released, drawing together a comprehensive suite of resources to support open access book publishing;
- Copim is planning a conference on 26-27 February to explore: What's next for community-led open access book publishing? Sign up for free in person or online.
Other highlights:
- Our Co-Director Rupert Gatti wrote 'Beyond "No Fee": Why Diamond Open Access Is Much More Than Just a Business Model' with Pierre Mounier and Johan Rooryck in Current Trends in Open Science: Will Open Science Change the World? (Ledzioni LediPublishing, 2025);
- Our senior editor and outreach coordinator Lucy Barnes wrote 'How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?' with Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman, Ursula Rabar and Niels Stern, published in Katina;
- We published important blog posts on the topics of academic freedom—including a contribution from author Ash Lierman—and open licensing;
- Our series editor Geoffrey Khan has released a case study about publishing the Semitic Languages and Cultures series in open access;
- We have also given various talks this year, on topics including AI in open access publishing and fostering a culture of open access book publishing beyond mandates.
*Image credit: Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash *
Open Book Publishers is now on Instagram! Follow us!
If you are too, please follow us there! We'll be sharing information about new books, conversations with authors, and glimpses 'behind the curtain' at the publishing process...
OBP is a 'Top 100 UK social enterprise' for the fifth year in a row!
We are thrilled to announce that we are once again on this year's SE100 list! For more information, and to see the other excellent organisations who have been selected, see this webpage.
