Open Book Publishers - Annual Report 2024

Welcome to our 2024 Annual Report!

As the year comes to a close, we're proud to reflect on an exciting period at OBP—filled with new open access titles, awards, and new exciting projects. It’s been a remarkable year, and we invite you to explore the highlights with us!

Announcements

• Proud to be in SE's Top 100
• Book Prizes
• We reevaluated and shifted our social media presence
• Exciting Website Updates!
• Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective
• Global Geographical Statistics

Books, libraries and content

• Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series
• Our Most Accessed Titles in 2024
• New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors
• Our 2024 OA Series: Calls for Proposal
• New Library Members

People

• Our Volunteers
• New Team Members
• Support Us!

Proud to be in SE's Top 100!

We’re thrilled to be included in the 2024 NatWest SE100 Index – marking our sixth consecutive year on the list! This annual index recognises the UK’s top 100 social enterprises for their growth, impact, and resilience, and we’re honoured to be among them once again.

Further details about this achievement can be found here.

Book Prizes

Three OBP publications have received major accolades in 2024, recognizing their scholarly impact and innovation:

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, was awarded both the 2024 Globalization & Education SIG (CIES) Best Edited Book Award and the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence – Open Collaboration, celebrating its forward-thinking approach to transforming higher education.

Aaron D. Hornkohl’s The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew won the 2024 British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies (BIAJS) Annual Book Prize, praised as “an impressive piece of research” for tracing the Tiberian reading tradition back to the Second Temple period.

Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation, edited by Anna Beresin and Julia Bishop, received the 2024 Iona and Peter Opie Prize, honoring its compelling examination of creativity and play during the global pandemic.

We reevaluated and shifted our social media presence

We decided to leave Twitter/X at the end of October. Though we will continue to check our account periodically through the end of the year, we will no longer be contributing content to X. We invite you to connect with us on our other socials:

Bluesky: @openbookpublish.bsky.social  
Mastodon: @OpenBookPublish@hcommons.social
LinkedIn: open-book-publishers

Speaking of social media, the Open Access Books Network (OABN) has also joined Bluesky. Follow them here: https://bsky.app/profile/oabooksnetwork.bsky.social

Exciting Website Updates!

We have recently completed a comprehensive update to our website! This update has made it more informative and visually engaging for our readership.

Here are some of the key updates our team has implemented:

• Content Refresh: Our team has meticulously updated numerous pages that were previously outdated.
• Enhanced Visuals: To improve user experience, our team has incorporated a variety of visuals, including diagrams, graphs, and logos, across various pages (see, for example, Our Vision). These additions not only make the content more visually appealing but also aid in conveying complex information effectively.
• New Page - 'Our Reach': Our team has introduced a new page titled 'Our Reach' (accessible here) which meticulously showcases our readership statistics. This page serves as a testament to our impact and is prominently linked from our home page for easy access.
• Improved Organization: To streamline content presentation, our team has relocated information regarding our readership statistics from the open software section to the newly created 'Our Reach' page. This change not only enhances the coherence of our website but also addresses previous concerns about content alignment.

We invite you all to explore the revamped website and discover the wealth of new information our team has meticulously curated. Take a moment to visit the updated site and delve into the latest content

Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective

It has now been almost two years since we announced that Open Book Publishers had joined the Open Book Collective (OBC). In that time, many of our long-standing library members have chosen to renew their Open Book Publishers membership through the collective, showing their commitment to building a fairer and more sustainable open access book publishing ecosystem. We are also delighted to have welcomed new library members who have kindly decided to support us via the OBC. To both our renewing and new members, we want to extend a heartfelt thank you. Your support makes an enormous difference.

If you are a library member and would like to explore what the OBC offers please get in touch with our Head of Libraries Laura Rodriguez, at laura@openbookpublishers.com.

We also invite you to revisit our original announcement, where we outlined our reasons for joining the OBC and explained what this collaboration means for libraries, authors, and readers. By working together, we can continue to build a stronger, more sustainable ecosystem for open access books.

Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report

Global Geographical Statistics

We collect and display detailed readership statistics (also known as usage data, or metrics) for our books on each book's home page. There you can see how often the book has been downloaded or read online via a number of different platforms, including our own website and external platforms such as the OAPEN Library and Google Books. There are also some geographical data about where the book has been accessed. See further down this page for more information about how we collect this data, and how we aggregate it for each book.

Below are our global readership statistics for 2024, highlighting engagement with our titles from every country, state, and territory worldwide, a clear reflection of the truly global reach of our publications.

In the landscape of our readership, North America, Europe, and Asia emerge as the primary contributors in 2024, 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 our 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!

Annual Readership Report Information

Please note that access to our books in HTML format was tracked until July 2023, but the platform we used for this is no longer available. Our developers at OBP are working on new solutions.

We can still record usage across some platforms, showing how much a book is accessed there (based on the platform’s own measurements), in which formats, over time, from which parts of the world (in some cases), and from specific domains (useful for Library Members who want to see how their students and staff are using the Membership).

This information is only partial. Many sites that host our books do not provide usage data, and geographical data may be limited by platform restrictions or users who block collection. Once a file is downloaded, we cannot track how it is used or shared, much like sales figures for print or ebook editions.

For more on how we collect and process readership statistics, please visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/about/our-reach.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting our titles. With the help of our readers, member libraries, and authors, we can continue working towards a fairer publishing landscape!

Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series

This year we published first book of the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series, a distinguished collaboration between the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews and Open Book Publishers.

Titled Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité and edited by Pauline Beaucé and Jeffrey M. Leichman, this groundbreaking work delves into the intricacies of performance venues during the early modern period.

The St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series endeavors to enrich scholarly discourse surrounding the historical culture of the French-speaking world. Covering a diverse array of themes—from political and military history to literary culture—the series is committed to publishing concise yet illuminating monographs and studies.

Each title in the series undergoes rigorous peer review by our editorial board and external assessors, ensuring academic integrity and excellence. Available in both digital and hard copy formats, these publications will contribute significantly to our understanding of French history and culture.

Stay tuned for more groundbreaking publications from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series!

Our Most Accessed Titles in 2024

Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University by Stephen Siklos

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

Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher  

No Prices No Games! Four Economic Models by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein

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

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

Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt: 2023 European Public Investment Outlook by Floriana Cerniglia, Francesco Saraceno and Andrew Watt

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

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

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

New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors

This year we proudly celebrated the publication of 57 books, an outstanding milestone that reflects the dedication, and passion of our community of authors! We are thrilled to have welcomed both first-time authors as well as those returning to publish with us again.

To all our authors, we extend our heartfelt thanks. By choosing to publish with us, you not only enrich our catalogue but also strengthen our mission to make knowledge open and accessible to all.

Looking ahead, we are excited to continue supporting authors who are shaping the future of open access publishing. Each book we publish has the power to reach readers around the world, and together we are building a global community of scholarship and creativity. Here’s to the achievements of this year and to the many new works and opportunities the coming year will bring!

Our 2024 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.

New Library Members

Since January 2024, 17 new libraries have joined as members, supporting our Open Access mission to make academic research freely available to everyone worldwide.

You can view the full list of current members here and membership benefits here. Membership is free for libraries in Economically Developing Countries. If you are a librarian at an eligible institution and would like more information, please contact us at libraries@openbookpublishers.com.

We are deeply grateful for the support of our member libraries, both new and renewing. Your contributions are vital to sustaining our work. We also welcome suggestions on how we can better support you—please do get in touch at libraries@openbookpublishers.com.

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. For more information or to discuss a possible placement, please contact Alessandra Tosi.

We also welcome volunteers of all experience levels. In 2024 we’ve been fortunate to work with some fantastic volunteers, and we warmly thank them for their dedication and support.

Anja Pritchard

Rose Cook

Sasha PG-Kirkham

Hannah Shakespeare

Cecilia M. Thon

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 one new team member:

Marketing Lead

Raegan Allen is a poet from Missouri. She holds a Master of Publishing from City, University of London, where she researched the use of brand in small, independent presses. Before moving to the UK, Raegan studied English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems have appeared in Zenaida and Alloy literary magazines. She directs marketing and publicity for OBP. Email: raegan@openbookpublishers.com.

We are delighted to have Raegan 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