Author Posts

Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem - A Q&A with Flora Kimmich

Q: How did translating Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem compare to your first translation with OBP, Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa? A: Wallenstein is in every sense a much bigger piece than Fiesco:  three plays instead of one; in verse and not in prose; a major tragedy and not a first

Our Top Five Most Read Books of 2016

Happy New Year from Open Book Publishers! As we leave 2016 behind, join us in taking a look at our top 5 most read books of the year. 5. The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines by Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann (eds.) Number 5

Libraries and Open Access

Open Scholarly Publishing and Libraries: Putting Conviviality into the Workflow for Monographs

The immaturity of open access monograph publishing compared with that of its siblings of journal and article publishing is well known. This is in spite of the evidence that “open access monograph publishing could indeed offer researchers new opportunities” (Collins et al., 2015), broaden, and deepen the impact of such

Libraries and Open Access

A Librarian’s Advice on Making the Most of Open Educational Resources

Due to the advent of the World Wide Web, there has been a paradigm shift in educational systems, in terms of its aspirations and its systems and sources. Classrooms are changing; in virtual classes, courses are conducted through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), lectures are presented in online/audio-video form.

Libraries and Open Access

Acceso Abierto Accesible y Recursos de Información en Discapacidad y Derechos Humanos

¿Por qué Acceso Abierto Accesible? Bueno, en principio… ¿Y por qué no? Para el año 2017 habrán hecho ya 15 años desde la iniciativa de Budapest para el Acceso Abierto [http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read]. En adelante se han gestionado diversas iniciativas, como la Declaración de Bethesda [http://ictlogy.net/

Libraries and Open Access

Accessible Open Access and Information Resources on Disability and Human Rights

Why Accessible Open Access? Well, in principle … And why not? By the year 2017 it will have been 15 years since the Budapest initiative for Open Access [http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read]. Various initiatives have since been taken, such as the Bethesda Declaration on Open Access in 2003 [http://ictlogy.

Author Posts

Trump and the Trillion Dollar Infrastructure Finance Challenge

On 9th November, after his victory in the American Presidential election, Donald Trump declared, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” His eyecatching pledge

Libraries and Open Access

Open Access Books and the Need to Catch Up

I want to like e-books, I really do. I like the idea that I can access my book anywhere I am, from any device I happen to be using at the time. I own a Kindle and for books that are available on the Kindle, this is the case: I

Libraries and Open Access - The December Series

For Open Access Week 2016, OBP published a series of blog posts by librarians, in which they shared their thoughts on Open Access books – all the blog posts can be read here [https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/category/libraries-oa/]. But we didn’t want the conversation to end there! We are

Libraries and Open Access

The Monograph Crisis: Open Access for Art and Design Scholarship

Electronic monographs are not as straightforward as journals. As a librarian assisting students in their research, ebooks don’t come up as frequently and when they do it usually involves resolving issues that come with difficult user interfaces. Disparate platforms and constricting digital rights management (DRM) result in poor usability

Libraries and Open Access

On why we should Love Open Access Books; a UK Librarian’s Perspective.

Many librarians in the UK (and as a profession, librarians have a long standing tradition of Open Access advocacy) find it galling that the term ‘ Open Access’ is increasingly met with either a stifled yawn or a rant about the inequities of article processing charges, publisher profits and the bureaucratic

Libraries and Open Access

Open Access books? I Thought OA was for Journals!

“I thought open access was about academic journals – why are you talking about books?” This is a common refrain that I hear when begin talking about the importance of open access books, one that I myself made not long ago, and I suspect this remains the case for many other

Digital Scholarship, Networked Scholarship, and Other Side Effects of Open

[1]As an early-career librarian, I am fortunate to have come into a world of academic libraries that already values Open Access. I learned about open access in my courses and discussed it at length with my peers over coffee in the student lounge at graduate school. I had the

A History of Open Access at The Royal Library of Belgium

The Royal Library of Belgium [http://www.kbr.be/en]’s collections have been growing since the XVth century. Throughout its history, from the Library of the Dukes of Bourgogne to the present day, the Royal Library (its official name since 1837) has continuously built its collections by means of

A Few Thoughts about Open Access Books

Electronic books, better known as e-books, first arrived in the early 1970s as digital versions of their print counterparts (Loan, 2015).  Since then, they have become an invaluable component of the publishing market as publishers and similar providers have offered e-books to consumers on a variety of platforms.  For academic

Open Access and Content and Discovery

The University of Nottingham has a long history of supporting open access [http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/library/research/open-access/index.aspx] publishing to further extend the reach and impact of our academics’ research. It is also a global institution with campuses in the UK, Malaysia and China. Since 2014,

The Ups and Downs of Institutional Repositories

Institutional Repositories (IR) have become a staple of most academic libraries. They are generally populated by Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs )and faculty peer-reviewed manuscripts, also known as post-prints in the parlance of green open access. The IR managed by Western Libraries at The University of Western Ontario, Scholarship@Western

Medieval Book Customisation and Open Access: a Brief (and slightly tortured) Comparison

Kathryn Rudy’s latest book Piety in Pieces [http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/477], details the activities of medieval book owners who personalised their books by inserting new pages, drawings, and notes. These personalisations ranged from minor modifications such as placing loose images between leaves, or adding notes to blank

Leveraging Distributed Proofreaders for Open Content Enhancement (and some unexpected consequences)

For many years, Villanova University’s Digital Library [https://digital.library.villanova.edu]has been providing open access to out-of-copyright books, journals, newspapers, and other content. From the beginning, this content was provided in the form of scanned images of the original materials, sometimes augmented by computer-generated OCR. While this

What does it mean for a work of literature to be “against criticism”?

What does it mean for a work of literature to be “against criticism”? After all, it is a sure fact that the market conditions for the reception of much literary fiction are fostered within the walls of university English departments. Many others have also charted the ways in which contemporary

Open Access Week - Librarian Bloggers Needed!

Open Access week is fast approaching! There are some fantastic events and other projects in the OA Week lineup, all available to look through on theOA Week website [http://www.openaccessweek.org/]. Here at OBP, we are planning some of our own projects for OA Week – we will be publishing

Environmentalism and Social Performance

We are pleased to announce the release of Heike Graf’s latest work The Environment in the Age of the Internet: Activists, Communication and the Digital Landscape. This collection of essays focuses on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, drawing on case studies from around the

Do Composers Live in a Bubble?

Do composers live in a bubble? I do not think so. Years ago I had a musical conversation with a friend of mine. As a non-specialist, at some point he decided to pick my mind and ask me, the specialist, about composers’ lives: “I studied a little bit of music

Art in Times of Conflict

As OBP and I get ready to publish Theatre & War: Notes from the Field, my excitement is tempered with a little bit of – what I can only term – hopelessness. Because, you see, I have just returned to the safety of my New Mexican home from my annual theatre-project-related visit to

Enhanced Multi-Media Bilingual Edition of 'Rameau's Nephew': Bringing Education to Life

Our award winning book, Denis Diderot ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ – ‘Le Neveu de Rameau’, winner of the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies’ 2015 Prize for Digital Publication, has been re-issued as an enhanced bilingual edition. The new interactive edition now includes the fully interactive French test available alongside its translation, as