December 2024 Newsletter

OBP Newsletter • Feb 21, 2025

Open Book Publishers

Arthur Thiele, Wild im Winterwald (1874). Public Domain.

Welcome to our December Newsletter!

We hope this email finds you well and that your December has been wonderful so far. We know it's an especially busy time, but we wanted to drop in with a few updates and announcements before the new year -- and wish everyone a happy holiday season, of course!

What happened this month:

We published four new books

Breaking Images: Iconoclastic Analyses of Mathematics and its Education edited by Brian Greer, David Kollosche, and Ole Skovsmose

Investing in the Structural Transformation: 2024 European Public Investment Outlook
edited by Floriana Cerniglia and Francesco Saraceno

Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative across Versions edited by Dirk Van Hulle

The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens by Justin Smith

All of our titles are free to read and download. Explore our complete catalogue here.

PNG Image with Text of Cape Town Declaration on Diamond Open Access

Our founders attended the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access

Open Book founders Alessandra and Rupert joined fellow publishers, librarians, and other stakeholders in Cape Town for a week of dialogue regarding the improvement and expansion of Diamond OA. We encourage you to read the above declaration written by the conference participants. You can learn more about the conference and its goals here.

Interested in learning more about Diamond OA? Rupert has co-authored the following article on the model and its possibilities: Beyond 'no fee': why Diamond Open Access is much more than a business model.

Image of an airplane flying over the clouds

"Airplane in Sky Above Clouds" by Image Catalog is marked with CC0 1.0.

We reflected on our company travel policy and committed to offsetting carbon emissions

For several years now, since the end of 2019, OBP has had a no-fly policy: staff do not travel by plane for work purposes. However, this year, as we have become more involved in international projects, and as in-person gatherings have become much more frequent after the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to revise this blanket ban.

We still use alternative modes of transport and take up hybrid options wherever possible. But if there is no suitable hybrid option, if the alternative means of transport would take more than one day’s journey, and if we deem attendance at the event to be sufficiently important to our work, we will travel by plane.

As well as keeping air travel to a minimum, we have decided to use the World Land Trust’s carbon calculator to measure and offset the carbon generated by the air travel that we do undertake. We will be calculating our carbon cost and donating to offset this every six months.

What's coming up:

18 January, 6PM: Author Jonathan Mallinson will give an online lecture for the English Ceramic Circle titled '”A chemical and artistic triumph”: William Moorcroft and Florian ware.' Find more information here.

21 January, 12 PM: Open Research at York will host a webinar on 'The realities, challenges and future of open access publishing.' This session will provide an insightful and critical discussion of the realities and challenges facing open access today, with perspectives from authors, publishers and librarians. Register for the event here.