OBP Summer Newsletter 2021
Welcome to our Summer Newsletter!
We have information on our open CFPs, the most recent updates, new and forthcoming publications and latest reviews. Also, the latest set of MARC records containing all our new and past titles is now available here. There’s lots to explore below, so dive in to find out more about our plans for the months ahead...
Announcements
- In memoriam: William St Clair
- NatWest SE100 2021
- Reader Survey
- Ask an OBP Author
- OABN: new recordings from Plan S workshops
- COPIM: reports and updates
- OAPEN Toolkit: a resource for authors
Books, Readership and Content
- New Open Access Publications
- Discussing OA Books: OBP & EIFL
- Call for Proposals
- New Blog Posts and Videos
- Latest Reviews
- Our Library Scheme
We are immensely saddened to say that our Chairman, William St Clair, died on the evening of Wednesday 30th June.
In this post we share tributes that have been given in his honour, including by family and friends during his memorial at The Athenaeum on 23 July 2021, and by scholars whom he influenced with his pioneering work. Rest in peace William; you will be greatly missed.
William St Clair (1937-2021) was the Chairman of the Board of Directors. William was a Fellow of the British Academy and held fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge and Harvard. His publications include That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War for Independence (rev. ed. 2008) and historical studies of literary dissemination.
We’re thrilled to have made it on this year’s NatWest SE100 Index highlighting the UK’s most outstanding in Social Enterprises.
We achieved a 9/10 social impact score in the SE100 Rankings 2019 and were also among the top 100 social enterprises in the NatWest SE100 2020. See the full list at https://immersives.pioneerspost.com/natwest-se100-.
Help Open Book Publishers make the case for open access books!
Please answer a few questions about how you use our books. This will only take a couple of minutes, and it will help us to demonstrate the importance of making books freely available. Please share the questionnaire with your networks too.
Complete the questionnaire to be entered into a prize draw to win a free book of your choice!
Link: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/SPJM8K/
If you want to find out more about what it’s like to publish with us, email Professor Caroline Warman (caroline.warman@Jesus.ox.ac.uk), author of The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's ‘Éléments de physiologie’ (2020) and translator of Denis Diderot 'Rameau's Nephew' – 'Le Neveu de Rameau': A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition (2nd ed., 2016) and Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment (2016).
The Open Access Books Networks has recently released the Voices from the OA Books Community Summary: The Great Polyphony.
The draft document summarizing the sessions and an introduction highlighting key takeaways, are available here and will remain open until 12 August 2021. After that time, SPARC Europe will prepare the final version of the document, which will be presented to cOAlition S in early September 2021.
You can access this and other resources from the Open Access Books Network at https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/about-us/.
Access the latest COPIM reports:
Exploring Models for Community Governance by Sam Moore
Jisc subscriptions manager is now live for Opening the Future and CEU Press by Tom Grady, Martin Paul Eve, and Work Package
Liverpool University Press join Opening the Future by Tom Grady and Martin Paul Eve
COPIM Newsflash! #3 Project Update May 2021 by Tobias Steiner and Lucy Barnes
COPIM/CEU Press Opening the Future initiative announced as a finalist in ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing by Tom Grady, Martin Paul Eve, and WP3
Experimental Publishing collaboration with POP, the Politics of Patents project by Julien McHardy.
The Open Access Books Toolkit, hosted by OAPEN, aims to help book authors better understand their options in relation to open access book publishing, and to increase trust in open access books. You will find relevant articles on all aspects of open access book publishing at different stages of the research lifecycle, along with an extensive FAQ section and a keyword search. Our Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Lucy Barnes, helped to create the Toolkit, so it comes highly recommended!
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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.
How To Read Russian Literature Backwards by Muireann Maguire
Autism and Ethics: The Stories We Tell by Flora Kann Szpirglas
The Middle is Marching: Adam Roberts, on reading George Eliot’s 'Middlemarch' by Adam Roberts
1,000 pages of evidence for conservation actions by the Conservation Evidence Team
A View From under The Horse’s Tail. New Perspectives on Literature? by Roger Paulin
Lucy Barnes, Editor and Outreach Coordinator, and Laura Rodriguez, Marketing and Library Relations Officer at Open Book Publishers discuss the creation and usage of open access books with librarians and researchers in a webinar hosted by EIFL in May 2021.
You can access the discussion at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FyrFctVTjA&feature=youtu.be
Chronicles from Kashmir: An Annotated, Multimedia Script by Nandita Dinesh
At the end of each performance, [audiences] learn something very special about the lived experience of the Kashmiris, and this sinks heavy in their consciousness. They become wiser about Kashmir than they had ever been. The multimedia script is very innovative and highly experimental in nature […] The scenes are designed effectively with potent symbols, and the sensitive issues are presented in a balanced way. This play on "conflict tourism” will undoubtedly create ripples among theatregoers and people engaged in the politics of representation.
— Himadri Lahiri, Netaji Subhas Open University, India, Asiatic, Vol. 15, No. 1, June 2021, available online.
Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa by John W. Wilson and Richard B. Primack
The authors are to be congratulated on publishing an open-access book brimming with examples relevant to Africa. My fervent hope is that it will assist in some way in the training of a cohort of passionate and persistent leaders among the next generation of conservation biologists. We are going to need them.
—Van Wilgen BW. 'A valuable resource for African conservation students'. South African Journal of Science. 2021;117(5/6), Art. #9310. https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2021/9310
Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays by Hans Walter Gabler
Gabler’s collection is a masterful lesson in textual genetics and scholarly editing by one of the field’s great masters. With examples from Joyce, Woolf, Shakespeare, and Bach, the essays present deep insights into textual scholarship and genetic criticism. The passion and sense of wonder that underlie them is contagious. Gabler’s argument for the future of scholarly editing and criticism takes us to a place where we can see the immense potential in what lies ahead. The collection will certainly, both in part and as a whole, become essential reading in the fields of Joyce studies, textual scholarship, and genetic criticism.
— Barry Devine, Heidelberg University, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Spring 2021
Introducing Vigilant Audiences by Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov and Qian Huang
A topical collection of works, 'Introducing Vigilant Audiences' is a useful collection to scholars within media and communication, social sciences, law, politics, and philosophy The accessibility provided by empirical studies and the depth of qualitative sources ensures that this book would also be of interest to those who are new to the academic study of digilantism more broadly.
— Amy L. Gainford (2021), International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, DOI: 10.1080/13600869.2021.1949826
A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 by Andrew Hobbs
This book is not only rich in its arguments but extraordinarily generous in its methodological transparency [...] Coupled with the book’s open access format and Hobbs’s candid sharing of the limitations of his sources, this approach really feels like research sharing [...] Starting with the reader and understanding the local press as a national phenomenon, this book persuasively negates the idea that we can never really know how readers responded to the local press, providing compelling and well-substantiated answers to precisely this question.
— Holdway, Katie. 2021. Victorian Popular Fictions, 3.1 (Spring): 155-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/JWWZ9478
The Open Book Publishers' Library Membership Programme supports our award-winning Open Access monograph publishing programme. By joining the Programme for an annual fee of £300/$500/€400, libraries and their users both support and benefit from OA publishing. We would be delighted to hear from libraries considering joining the Library Membership Programme or interested in further information. You can find the list of benefits here. We are delighted to offer a special 10% discount to members of SPARC and JISC Collections - just mention your membership when you contact us!
Free membership for libraries in economically developing countries: For institutions based in economically developing nations some fees may not apply. 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 our Marketing and Library Relations Officer Laura Rodriguez at laura@openbookpublishers.com.
