OBP Autumn Newsletter 2021
Welcome to our Autumn Newsletter!
We have information on our new open position, updates from COPIM, OABN and ScholarLed, events, new and forthcoming publications, latest reviews and more...Keep reading to find out more!
Announcements
- We are hiring!
- Frank Moore Cross Award Winner
- Reader Survey
- New Open Access Kit
- ScholarLed Invite for Membership Applications
- Open Access Books Network
- COPIM
- From Orality to Open by Mark Turin
- Events
- Follow our authors!
Books, Readership and Content
- New Open Access Publications
- Forthcoming Titles
- Call for Proposals
- New Blog Posts and Videos
- Latest Reviews
- Our Library Scheme
Software Engineer: 18 months full-time or part-time position. FTE Salary £24-35k depending on experience.
We are looking for a software engineer who is enthusiastic about open source and Open Access initiatives, to join our small energetic team. OBP is taking a leading role in developing open source infrastructure to support open access book publishing. We are presently: responsible for the development of the Open Dissemination System and Archiving and Preservation services for open access books within the Research England and Arcadia Fund financed COPIM project providing hosting services for a number of Open Access initiatives and projects in the process of re-developing our own website to provide an open source and white label website for other Open Access book publishers to adopt expecting to be involved in other similar initiatives over the coming months. We are seeking a versatile software engineer to work alongside our existing development team across these development projects.
The successful candidate will be working directly with the Lead Software Engineer on these projects. The role will be varied and broad ranging, including: the development of open source infrastructure as well as maintenance and deployment of supporting scripts; designing and implementing sound data models; implementing unit and end-to-end tests to ensure the reliability of the software through its update cycle; writing documentation for any piece of software produced; designing backup and disaster recovery plans; and offering user support.
This is a full-time fixed term (18 month) position to support our development work through to the completion of the COPIM project, although we also welcome applications for those only interested in a part-time position. We delight in diversity within our workforce and encourage applications from people with backgrounds not typically well represented in the computing and publishing industries. The position will be available to start immediately. Gross (FTE) annual salary will be in the range GBP £24,000-£35,000 (depending on experience).
If you are interested in joining us and engaging directly in the development of a vibrant open academic publishing ecosystem then please contact, or send a CV and covering letter, to Rupert Gatti (jobs@openbookpublishers.com), ideally by November 30th but later applications will be accepted until an appointment is made.
We are proud to announce that The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1 & Volume 2 has been selected as the winner of this year's Frank Moore Cross Award for best book related to the history and/or religion of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.
This is the first title published as part of our Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures series, published in collaboration with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.
This series includes philological and linguistic studies of the Semitic languages, editions of Semitic texts and studies of Semitic cultures. To find out more, visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/107/1
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/
You can now download our latest Open Access Kit! This pack contains:
- Information for libraries, authors and researchers
- Informative videos about Open Access publishing
- Posters and other media products
- Information for first-time authors
Download now at https://tinyurl.com/4d5ktssf
ScholarLed is a consortium of scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers, founded in 2018 by Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books. As open access book publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we share a commitment to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships, resisting the marketisation of academic knowledge production, and working collaboratively rather than in competition. Collectively we are developing ways for small-scale, scholar-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly.
We are delighted and proud to announce that ScholarLed is now registered as a not-for-profit foundation in the Netherlands. We are run by a board drawn from the participating presses (see our bylaws here) and welcome like-minded scholar-led presses to join our consortium. Read more about how to become a member of ScholarLed here.
Why join ScholarLed?
As a collective of scholar-led presses we are establishing collaborative modes of working and building shared infrastructures to support the work of publishers like us. We call this ‘scaling small’.
- We have established a ScholarLed catalogue on OAPEN, which includes hundreds of open access books published by our presses giving weight and visibility to our publications.
- We have developed a lightweight bookstand, allowing us to showcase the output of the whole consortium at conferences and events. (The design and instructions to create your own version of the bookstand, as well as the source code of our website, are freely available for other presses to use here on our website.)
- We are also key partners in the international COPIM project, giving member presses potential access to community-owned, open systems, meta-data management solutions and infrastructures in development.
The founding presses operate in Europe, the UK, the US, and Australasia. Already somewhat distributed, we would love to collaborate with presses from different scholarly, disciplinary, institutional and geographic locations and encourage you to join forces with us to strengthen the global collective stewardship of open access. For us, this requires removing structural and organisational barriers holding back change in the open books landscape while being aware, supportive and respectful of the differences amongst us.
Please get in touch at info@scholarled.org if you want to learn more about ScholarLed or join us.
The Open Access Books Networks has released the following blogs and collaborations:
Open Access Book Programs: Answering Libraries’ Questions By Sharla Lair (Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, LYRASIS)
Who you gonna call? OA Mythbusters: For this year’s Open Access Week, the Open Access Books Network (OABN) is pleased to introduce its latest video series: ‘The OA Mythbusters’.
To access these and more resources, visit https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/blog/
Access the latest COPIM reports:
New Thoth Releases and WP5 Updates by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Rupert Gatti, Javier Arias, and Timothy Elfenbein
Thoth, open metadata and building structural equity: an interview for Open Access Week by Javier Arias and Lucy Barnes
Year 2 of COPIM: what have we achieved? by Lucy Barnes
Announcing the fourth book funded by the Opening the Future programme by Work Package 3 and Tom Grady
New COPIM Research Report on Interaction and Reuse Published Today by Janneke Adema and Tobias Steiner
Next steps for the Open Book Collective by Work Package 2
Librarian spotlight on KU Leuven by Work Package 3, Tom Grady, and Martin Eve
Collective Governance: an Update from The Open Book Collective Work Package by Judith Fathallah
Data Books & Data Bodies: Performing Archival Data differently by Julien McHardy, Kat Jungnickel, Rebekka Kiesewetter, and Ellen Fowles
Tentative Florilegium: Experiments & Recipes for ReWriting Books by Julien McHardy
Mark Turin, Director of our World Oral Literature Series, has recently published a new article in Pop! Public where he shares the story of the purpose and methods of the World Oral Literature series. Read an excerpt below:
Over the past eight years, this fully open access and revised edition of Oral Literature in Africa has been accessed by over 200,000 readers in over 188 different countries. There have also been some modest hardcopy sales, all of which are printed on demand and shipped. The key takeaway from this story is this: thanks to the accessibility afforded by open access publishing, Oral Literature in Africa has now been accessed and downloaded more in Africa than in any other continent—something unimaginable when it was first published half a century ago. This publication demonstrates how scholarship can flourish when publishing has ethical knowledge dissemination at its centre, as opposed to profit. The goal of the World Oral Literature series is to make publications like Oral Literature in Africa more widely available, particularly to the communities whose cultures and languages are the focus, and to explore innovative and culturally appropriate ways of disseminating oral narratives through new forms of networked media.
Mark Turin, 2021. "From Orality to Open: Innovations in Multimedia Monograph Publishing in the Humanities." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 3 (2021-11-09).
You can freely access the full article at https://popjournal.ca/issue03/turin
Join us in conversation with the contributors of 'Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe', edited by Eszter Krasznai Kovacs.
About this event
When: December 2nd, 2021 |15:00 GMT | 16:00 CET (ONLINE) Time Zone Conversion Tool
Panelists:
- Petr Jehlička – Discussant
- Eszter Krasznai Kovács – Editor, Panelist, Convenor
- Tatiana Thieme – Convenor
- György Pataki – Panelist, Co-Convenor
- George Iordăchescu – Panelist, Co-convenor
- Imola Püsök – Panelist
- June Brawner – Panelist
- Alexandra Coțofană – Panelist
- Jovana Dikovic – Panelist
- Mikulás Černìk - Panelist
RSVP: https://tinyurl.com/phkjj77c
This event is FREE.
NEW EXHIBITION: 'Edina/Athena: The Greek Revolution and the Athens of the North, 1821–2021'.
When: Mon-Sat, 9am-4pm, from 29 Oct 2021 to 29 Jan 2022.
Where: Exhibition Gallery, University Library, 30 George Square, Edinburgh.
Find out more at https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/news-events/events/leventis-2021-exhib
We would like to invite you to follow Professor Ariel Rubinstein, author of Economic Fables and co-author Models in Microeconomic Theory, on his new Twitter account at https://twitter.com/ArielRubinstein.
Remember you can also follow Open Book Publishers on Twitter at https://twitter.com/OpenBookPublish.
Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture by M. J. Grant
The Great Reset: 2021 European Public Investment Outlook by Floriana Cerniglia, Francesco Saraceno, and Andrew Watt (eds)
Coping: A Philosophical Guide by Luc Bovens. Illustrations by Fiorella Lavado
Epidicus by Plautus: An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation by Catherine Tracy
William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: A Life by William F. Halloran
Horos: Ancient Boundaries and the Ecology of Stone by Thea Potter
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
ἱστορία and the κόσμος by Philip S. Peek
On Open Access and Equity: Thoughts from our Authors
A Sacred Task by William Boone Bonvillian
Burst the Frames: Open Access at the Dissertation Level by Anke Finger and Virginia Kuhn
Why Open Access? by Daniel Rueda Garrido
On 'A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic' by Esther-Miriam Wagner
VIDEOS
Book launch - Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
Book Trailer: 'Documentary Making for Digital Humanists' by Darren R. Reid and Brett Sanders
The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie' by Caroline Warman
Overturning prevailing views that Denis Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie' was incomplete, fragmentary, and noncirculating, Warman (Univ. of Oxford, UK) argues that this little-studied work made a significant contribution to materialist thought. In 13 chapters divided in two parts, Warman revives Diderot’s treatise as a seminal work of the Enlightenment [...] Those interested in the history of philosophy, the history of medicine, or the Enlightenment in general will find this work pivotal for understanding Diderot’s contribution to atheism and materialism.
— V. Arnaud, California State University, Sacramento, CHOICE Connect, October 2021 Vol. 59 No. 2
Introducing Vigilant Audiences by Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov and Qian Huang
Trottier et al. assembled a diverse cross-section of contributors in 'Introducing Vigilant Audiences', allowing for a truly holistic and interdisciplinary approach to a subject matter that demands it [...] 'Introducing Vigilant Audiences' will be of interest to policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand emerging online behaviors better. Beyond this, as mentioned, it provides an accessible entry point for undergraduates and graduates interested in crime and sociological phenomenon in the emerging online space, especially a work drawing from multiple academic perspectives. The interdisciplinary scope of Introducing Vigilant Audiences may even be beneficial for more experienced scholars, potentially offering new insights on familiar topics.
—Paul Bleakley, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom, International Criminal Justice Review, DOI:10.1177/10575677211034228
B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data by Stephen Robertson
Although the technology of information handling is at the centre of this book it is also about the people who devised and developed the technology and the historical context of when they were inventing the future. You need no knowledge of information technology to benefit from Stephen’s analysis and wisdom, and for this reason it should be essential reading not just for students on IT courses but for anyone who just for a moment wonders how we got to where we are today. Other authors who have attempted to do this include Ann Blair, Alex Wright and James Gleick. These authors may go into more detail on some aspects of BC but none have the balance and style of Stephen Robertson, who exudes a kind of quiet authority as he tells the story of BC. In the end it is his skill as a storyteller as well as a deep appreciation of information technologies (I use the plural deliberately) that makes this book a treasure to read and learn from. Without doubt it gets my award for My Book Of The Year. You don’t even need a budget to read it – the PDF is free to download.
— Martin White, University of Sheffield, Informer (IRSG). Available online.
Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín's Music Schools by Geoffrey Baker
Social action through music is inescapably complex, and Baker successfully unravels critical intricacies with a rare combination of detail and clarity… The inquiry is ruthlessly honest, but not needlessly so: the text is an objective but appropriately appreciative account of the work in Medellín, bolstered by a highly-informed exploration that gives it international relevance…, offering guidance, insight and even inspiration.
— Jonathan Govias, The Strad, 21 September 2021. Available online.
Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by Nora Bartlett. Edited by Jane Stabler
A collection of insightful talks and essays on Jane Austen … Nora Bartlett throws light on the characters’ moments of grace, or on the power and truth of emotions … her acute and sympathetic observations … aim at developing the readers’ clear and accurate perception of Austen’s nuanced prose, and their awareness of more political themes, such as women’s economic and social predicament at the turn of the nineteenth century.
— Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou, "Nora Bartlett, Jane Austen: Reflections of A Reader”, Miranda [Online], 23 | 2021, https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.41659
Towards an Ethics of Autism: A Philosophical Exploration by Kristien Hens
This book contributes to the current raging discussion over society’s view of autism and the examination of the concept’s realistic and ethical significance. The author successfully fulfils the goal of incorporating rich experiences from all angles of knowledge and delivering the unheard voices of autistic individuals to readers through both major queries and germane assertions on the unexplained part of criticism directed at autistic people.
— Wan Hazrena Fakeeza Wan Zakaria, Universiti Putra Malaysia, International Journal of Education & Literacy Studies,Vol 9, No 4 (2021). Available online.
On the Literature and Thought of the German Classical Era: Collected Essays by Hugh Barr Nisbet
Das vorliegende Buch ist das wissenschaftliche Vermächtnis von Hugh Barr Nisbet (1940–2021), Emeritus des Sidney Sussex College und Nestor der britischen Aufklärungsfor-schung. Nisbet schloss die Arbeit an diesem Band im Dezember 2020 ab, wenige Wochen vor seinem Tod am 6. Februar 2021. Seine Absicht war es, so der Verfasser und zugleich Herausgeber in seinem konzisen Vorwort, einige der zentralen Probleme und Ideenbe-wegungen des Klassischen Zeitalters der deutschen Literatur und Kultur zu konstellieren. Die von ihm für diesen Zweck aus einem reichen Fundus ausgewählten Studien haben daher trotz ihrer jeweils konkreten Denkanlässe Anspruch auf überzeitliche Bedeutung – sie sind in den Jahren nach ihrer Erstpublikation nicht durch weitere Forschungen ‚gelöst‘ oder ‚überholt‘ worden: „I have selected them", so Nisbet, „as the most important items in connection with problems presented by the major thinkers and writers working at that time" (S. vii). Entsprechend groß ist die thematische Vielfalt der Beiträge. Sie verhandeln philosophische, ästhetische, theologische, religiöse und natürlich literatur-, rezeptions-, wis-senschafts- und ideengeschichtliche Fragen und widmen sich Autoren wie Winckelmann, Kant, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel und anderen. Als britischen Philologen inte-ressieren Nisbet dabei naturgemäß auch Fragen des Kulturtransfers und der Kanonisierung [...] Damit steht der Lektüre der hier angezeigten Studien, die alle an der Literatur der Aufklärung und der klassisch-romantischen Wende um 1800 Interessierten reizen dürfte, nichts mehr im Wege.
— Cord-Friedrich Berghahn (Braunschweig), Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 71.4 (2021).
Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels by R. H. Winnick
Winnick’s [is] not a critical edition, as he notes himself, and it’s not merely a listing of quotations pulled from Google, despite his self-effacing reminders that he ‘made extensive use of those digitized search tools to complement my own far less than photographic memory’. After all, as anyone with a cursory working knowledge of digital searching can tell you, the end results are only as good as the searcher, and Winnick succeeds admirably.
— Emily Kramer, Essays in Criticism, Volume 71, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 237–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgab003