Open Book Publishers - Annual Report 2022

annual report • Dec 16, 2022
http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0214
Laura Rodríguez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3492-5998

Welcome to our Annual Report!  

As we come to the end of this year, it is with great pride that we look back at the many exciting things that have happened here at OBP in 2022!
From new open access titles, to awards, new  series and exciting projects, this has been a remarkable year for us. Keep reading to find out more!

Announcements

  • Proud to be in SE's Top 100
  • Book Prizes
  • New Website
  • COPIM
  • Open Access Books Network
  • Global Geographical Statistics
  • Our Most Accessed Titles (2022)

Books, libraries and content

  • New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors
  • Our 2022 OA Series: Calls for Proposal
  • Blogs, Videos, and Resources
  • New Library Membership
  • New Library Members

People

  • Our Volunteers
  • Testimonials
  • New Team Members
  • ​Support Us!

We’re thrilled to have made it on this year’s NatWest SE100 Index highlighting the UK’s most outstanding Social Enterprises!

This award celebrates the growth, impact and resilience of social ventures in the UK by recognising the most impressive 100 social enterprises of the year. You can read more about this here.

Book Prizes

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

Like Nobody's Business: An Insider's Guide to How US University Finances Really Work by Andrew C. Comrie and From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture by Roger Paulin have been selected by US librarians (from among other 3,700 reviewed titles) as two of this year's CHOICE Reviews' Outstanding Academic Titles for 2022.

Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew by Nick Posegay - Winner of the British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies (BIAJS) Annual Book Prize.

New Website

We have launched a brand new website!

Our new website is in line with the WCAG 2.1 standards, is OpenSource and can be reused by any publisher, and offers more in-detail book metadata information powered by Thoth.

Visit our latest blog blogs.openbookpublishers.com/new-website/to find out more about all the key improvements we've done!

COPIM

The COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project, in which OBP has a key role, is already in its third and last year!

You can find out more about the evolution of the project at https://copim.pubpub.org/, COPIM's Open Documentation page intended to provide discoverable and reusable insight into the development of community-owned infrastructure for the publication of open access books.

Open Access Books Network

OBP helps to coordinate the Open Access Books Network, an open network for anyone interested in OA books whether as a researcher, a publisher, a librarian, a student, or a reader.

The OABN website has been redesigned and a new 'resources' page is now available here. You can also access recordings of past events hosted by the OABN here.

Finally, remember to sign up to their mailing list to keep up to date with what’s happening next!


Global Geographical Statistics

Our Open Access titles are available on a number of different platforms, and readers have multiple ways of accessing them. Collecting and collating usage statistics for our books is challenging, and clearly, any data reported will be at the lower end of ‘true’ usage, as we are unable to obtain data from all platforms.
Below, you will find our global geographical stats:

This 2022 we welcomed readers from all countries, states and territories in the world, confirming that our titles have worldwide reach.

The United States, United Kingdom, India, Philippinesand Germany are in the top 5 this year, followed by Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Russia, Pakistan and Indonesia. We look forward to having an even bigger global impact in the years ahead.

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

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.

Our Most Accessed Titles (2022)

Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher  

Peace and Democratic Society by Amartya Sen (ed.)    

Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative by Ignasi Ribó

Plato's 'Republic': An Introduction by Sean McAleer

Ancient Greek I A 21st Century Approach by Philip S. Peek

Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University by Stephen Siklos

Simplified Signs: A Manual Sign-Communication System for Special Populations by John D. Bonvillian, Nicole Kissane Lee, Tracy T. Dooley and Filip T. Loncke

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

Arab Media Systems by Carola Richter and Claudia Kozman

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

New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors

This year we have published a total of 40 books! We have released 25 fantastic new OA titles from first-time OBP authors:

And we are delighted to announce that we have also published 15 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 2022 OA Series: Calls for Proposals

We are delighted to announce that this year we published the first book in our series Studies on Mathematics Education and Society and the first title in our series The Global Qur'an!

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


Ya Disponible: Replanteando la acción social por la música: la búsqueda de la convivencia y la ciudadanía en la Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín by Geoffrey Baker.
On Burns Night by M. J. Grant.
Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew by Nick Posegay.
HOROS: Ancient Boundaries and the Ecology of Stone by Thea Potter.
Book: Points of Contact, by Nick Posegay by Melonie Schmierer-Lee.
Open Education Resources by Daniel Rueda Garrido.
Open-access: Our Common Weapon in the Struggle Against Cartelism by Thea Potter.
On Open Access by Philip Graham.
Some Meanings Embedded in a Book Cover by John Black.
A Paean to the Much-maligned Cover Song by P.D. Magnus.
The Makings and Remakings of The Juggler of Notre Dame, A Medieval Miracle of the Virgin and Its Modernization: An Anthology by Jan M. Ziolkowski.
Maggot Medicine by Frank Stadler.
The Merger Mystery by Geoff and J. Gay Meeks.
The University of Worcester joins Open Book Publishers' Library Membership Scheme by Phil Jones, Head of Content and Discovery, Library Services, University of Worcester.
A People’s Voice by John Clairborne Isbell.
Is a Rights Retention Clause needed for OA books? by Rupert Gatti.
Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance by Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine.
Shrinking our carbon footprint: Open Access publishing and environmental sustainability by Lucy Barnes.
Linking Climate Justice and Open Access: the case for truly public knowledge by Mihnea Tănăsescu.
Fake Seeds and Dead Livestock: Where’s the Justice in that? by Thea Potter.
Artists were the First Environmentalists: Pictures Tracking Climate Change & Assaults on Nature by Katherine Manthorne​
Steven Jan on Music and/as Evolution
Transforming Conservation: A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making by William Sutherland
Greening Europe: Powering the argument for green investment during challenging times by Joanne Walton
The Little Drummer Boy and The Juggler of Notre Dame by Jan M. Ziolkowski


Articles

Mergers destroy value. Without reform, nothing will change by Geoff Meeks and J Gay Meeks, Financial Times, July 2022.
Why do so many company mergers fail, new book asks by Cambridge Judge Business School, July 2022.
Interest rates rise to highest level since 2009 – are there any silver linings? by Geoff Meeks and J Gay Meeks, LSE British Politics and Policy, August 2022.
Why we're entering a new age of 'Ecocene politics' by Mihnea Tănăsescu, The Loop.
Overcoming barriers to learning for the world's most marginalized by Suzanne Grant Lewis, UNESCO's Learning Portal, May 2022.
The lone scholar who exposed the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles cover-up by Francesca Peacock, The Telegraph, May 2022.
They’re playing our song! The philosophical puzzle of cover songs by PD Magnus, Psyche, December 2022.
When Can a Band Cover Their Own Song? by PD Magnus, Aesthetics for Birds, October 2022.

Videos

Book Trailer - 'A Common Good Approach to Development: Collective Dynamics of Development Processes'

Open Book Publishers - John Claiborne Isbell on 'An Outline of Romanticism in the West'.

Open Book Publishers - Editors Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine on 'Life, Re-Scaled'

Marcel Cobussen introduces his latest title 'Engaging with Everyday Sounds'

Ep. 28: {Nothing New? #2} Covers, Re-recordings, & Taylor's Versions | with P.D. Magnus

Book Launch: ‘Fragile States’ in an Unequal World
'Transforming Conservation: A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making' by William Sutherland

New Library Membership


At Open Book Publishers, we ensure that we do not need to charge authors a mandatory Open Access fee thanks to our mixed model of funding. The support we receive from libraries is vital to help us continue our work: the income from our Library Membership Programme constitutes a third of our annual revenue.

Since the membership was launched in 2015, Open Book Publishers has been steadily increasing the number of publications per year (with a growth of 275% since the first year of our membership), we have worked on the development of open-source infrastructure to lower the technical and financial barriers for others who wish to publish OA and our book accesses have increased a 310.28% - all while our membership fee remained unchanged.

We always aim to attract more libraries to our programme to reduce the amount of revenue we would need from other sources. However, to mitigate the concern over Open Book Publishers’ dependence on grant funds and to work towards a more sustainable model, last February we introduced our new library membership programme.

Open Book Publishers’ new membership allows institutions to choose their pricing tier and support OBP in agreement with their individual funding and subscription capacities. Our tier system consists of recommended prices that align with each institution’s size and budget. We don’t impose a tier on any institution, but we encourage institutions that are able to sign-up to their suggested tier or those that would like to join a higher tier to make their selection accordingly. Find out more information on tiers here.

New Library Members

Since January 2022, the libraries listed below have become members, thus supporting our OA mission of providing academic research free of charge to everyone, everywhere in the world:

Illinois State University
Vancouver Island University
Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
University of Cyprus
Concordia University Library
Oxford Brookes University
University of Virginia
University of Northern Colorado
UvA Universiteitsbibliotheek
University of Worcester
Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB)
University of Portsmouth
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Leeds Beckett University
Kalamazoo College
Loughborough University
Universidad de León
Lafayette College
University of Wolverhampton
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
University of Oregon
G. Pullareddy Degree & P.G College
London South Bank University
Rockefeller University
ETH Zürich
The University of Chicago Library
University of Cologne
Université Paris Nanterre
The Claremont Colleges
Hyderabad Institute of Technology and Management(HITAM)
University of Aberdeen
James Madison University
University of New South Wales
Universitätsbibliothek Klagenfurt

You can find the full list of current members here and the list of benefits here. Free membership for libraries in Economically Developing Countries. 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

At OBP, we offer direct training placements in all aspects of Open Access publishing, free of charge. We provide placements to individuals, as part of university courses such as the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, and to other Open Access publishers such as UGA Editions and Firenze University Press. However, we also welcome volunteers of different levels of skill and experience who want to work with us. This 2022 we have had the pleasure of working with 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!


Alice Gawthrop
Almudena Jimenez Virosta
Vasso Gkresta
Sophie Alexander
Sam Noble
Gabriel Newmeier-Drury
Simran Hussain
Ahmed Albadry
Cameron Baillie
Sara Harris
Joanne Walton
Niamh de Groot

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.

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


May the holiday season end the present year on a cheerful note and make way for a fresh and bright New Year!

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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