By Giuliano Pozza

"What should we choose, heaviness or lightness?"

Our collection of essays, The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI, starts from this question, contained in the unforgettable The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera, to try to reason about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an unconventional way. Some might wonder if there is a need for another book on AI, but we believe that this contribution can offer something original to the discussion of a vast and complex topic.

Through the lens of Kundera’s question, the book explores themes of sustainability, inclusion, ethics, digital sovereignty, education and learning, work and organizational impacts, security and medicine of the future. For each of these areas, both lightness and heaviness are analysed, showing that, as Kundera said, in heaviness there is sometimes a depth that allows us to better appreciate lightness as well.

The authors position themselves, taking a cue from Plato, as "sceptical believers" and they searched for positive deviants in each of these areas. The book invites us on an adventurous journey and, as J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, in every adventure there are sometimes uncomfortable situations.

The central theme running throughout the book is the tension between the challenges posed by AI and the opportunities it presents when developed and governed responsibly. Each chapter explores this duality by pairing a significant societal challenge, such as environmental sustainability, exclusion, inequality, loss of digital sovereignty, or barriers in healthcare and higher education, with a corresponding promise of AI, including more sustainable innovation, greater inclusion, improved health outcomes, stronger institutional autonomy, and the transformation of education. Rather than presenting AI as inherently beneficial or harmful, the authors examine the conditions under which it can become a force for positive change. Across diverse topics, the chapters demonstrate that the impact of AI depends not only on technological advances, but also on human choices, governance frameworks, and societal values. Together, these essays offer a balanced perspective on how AI can help address some of society's most pressing challenges, provided it is designed, deployed, and regulated in ways that prioritise fairness, transparency, sustainability, and the public good.

The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI is freely available in PDF and HTML; it can also be purchased in paperback, hardback and EPUB formats.

By Alice Battersby

In a recent debate in Parliament, MPs spoke about the pressure on people to change their accents to advance in their careers. People are keenly aware that others judge them according to their accent, and that employers may view regional accents as a sign of unintelligence or unprofessionalism. As MP Ian Lavery pointed out, accent discrimination is far more acceptable in society than discrimination on the basis of other characteristics. When this extends to categorising certain accents as incorrect and enforcing use of the standard, it is known by linguists as prescriptivism.

This is not new. People have a strong tendency to ascribe social meaning to accents, and to judge people according to how they speak. Those whose own accents are judged incorrect can be ashamed of them. One example of this comes from a perhaps unlikely source – a spelling system devised by Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s (along with his related writings), and discussed by Gary German in his recent two-volume open access study, Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician.

First drafted in 1768, then published in 1779 in an anthology (Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces Written by Benjamin Franklin), Franklin's spelling system reveals a lot about what he believed to be correct and proper English: not his own Boston accent, but the contemporary London way of speaking.

The spelling system had several purposes. Franklin believed it would make English easier to spell, by ensuring each letter corresponded to one sound, and that the sound was always the same. Franklin particularly envisioned it allowing children to learn to read and write more quickly. However, according to Gary German’s research, Franklin did not base this system on his own Boston accent, but instead on a London accent of the time. The spelling system was therefore intended to function as a method of presenting the ‘correct’ accent of English to speakers of other accents.

Evidence for the spelling system reflecting London pronunciation comes from several sources. German argues that Franklin’s letter to Polly Stevenson, his confidante and a Londoner, shows that Franklin wished to use her London speech as a model for his system.

‘I wish you to consider this Alphabet, and give me Instances of such English words and Sounds as you may think cannot perfectly be expressed by it. I am persuaded it may be completed by your help.’

This suggests that in his mind, her way of speaking was the proper way of speaking English, and the one he wished to promote. Furthermore, Franklin lived nearly fifteen years in London and spoke with some of the most powerful and illustrious Englishmen of his time.

Franklin’s transcriptions using his spelling system also indicate his attempts to bring the system closer to London speech. One example of this is the spelling of the sound written <y> in words such as ‘perfectly’ or ‘hurry’. Franklin’s original transcriptions of this word in his 1768 letters to Polly Stevenson indicate a pronunciation as a diphthong, a sound formed by the blending two vowels, in this case ‘uh’ + ‘ee’. The vowel here seems to have been pronounced similarly to the word ‘lie’. In a later letter to Polly, he adapts his transcription of perfectly to the more evolved ‘ee’ monophthong now used in contemporary Received Pronunciation and General American English. German suggests that the initial transcription is an error reflecting Franklin’s Boston English, which he later corrected to reflect the pronunciation in London, perhaps on Polly Stevenson’s advice. Further evidence for this comes from his poems, the earliest of which was published in 1719 when he was only thirteen and in which he rhymed ‘die’ and ‘manfully’, suggesting the final sounds were the same for him. This shows that Franklin wanted to replicate what he viewed as the standard. Regional variations such as his own were not to be included in his spelling system. The London pronunciations, to him, were the ones worthy of being taught.

Considering the context of the time, this could be viewed as surprising.  When Franklin initially drafted his spelling system, the relationship between Parliament and colonial American legislatures was worsening, and the book of Franklin’s writings was published during the War of Independence. Why would Franklin, in this political context, have based his system on London speech? Not everybody made the same choice. The lexicographer Webster, writing a few years later, argued against the idea of using the language of contemporary Great Britain as a model. German points out that Webster criticised London English as having deviated from older ‘purer’ English spoken in England during its Golden Age, that is, prior to 1727. Webster firmly believed that the English spoken in New England preserved the older pronunciation of England and that this should be the model for America. On the contrary, he considered that London English was evolving too far away from this older English model. Volume 2 of German’s book presents hundreds of examples supporting this contention.

And Franklin also had a lot of affection for his native Boston accent. Shortly before his death, he wrote that ‘the Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice, and accent in pronunciation’ were all pleasing to him, and were part of the reason why he wanted to visit his hometown again.

But though Franklin was hostile towards certain political aspects of Britain, such as the monarchy, this did not extend to its speech. Americans and Britons alike often forget that Franklin was a staunch Whig who enjoyed considerable support in England (e.g. former Prime Minister William Pitt). He was also a British patriot and defender of the British Empire who passionately believed that America’s role was crucial to its future greatness. Given that London was the capital of the Empire, Franklin believed that the English of educated Londoners should be the model for all English speakers. It was on this London model that he attempted to base his Reformed Mode of Spelling, not entirely successfully. Additionally, despite liking his native speech, Franklin seemingly believed it was simply inferior to that used in London. In his Autobiography, Franklin states he was ‘a bad speaker’ and ‘hardly correct in language’, and in earlier letters, he states he will ‘give up as bad’ words that were not in common use among Londoners.

Why would Franklin have thought this? German cites Looby, who suggests that Franklin would have become keenly aware of the social value of his accent when arriving in London to work as a printer’s apprentice at the age of 19. The differences between his own speech and the speech of those around him would have been obvious. Significantly, the speech he heard would have been the speech of the powerful and educated elite. As people do today, Franklin would have viewed the speech of these people as ‘correct’, making his own provincial and ‘incorrect’.

In this way, Franklin faced the same struggle in the 1700s as so many face today, including the MPs taking part in the recent debate. He spoke in a way that he believed to be inferior, but that he still liked and perhaps viewed as part of his identity. And as is the case today, the way of speaking that he believed was correct was largely arbitrary. Prescriptivism has existed for a long time. Perhaps it’s time to let it go.

Gary German's two-volume study is freely available in PDF and HTML, and available at a reasonable price in paperback, hardback and EPUB:

• Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician, Vol. 1: Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World
• Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician, Vol. 2: Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform

By Richard Heller

Inequity is everywhere in higher education, and my book Distributing Knowledge: Openness, Equity and Higher Education Transformation offers an equity lens through which the sector could transform itself.

There is inequity in the dissemination of knowledge, with variation in access to higher education between countries and regions within countries, as well as across various social groupings—the population groups to which you belong largely determines your access to learning opportunities. There is inequity in the creation of knowledge because the experiences of certain populations and groups are under-represented in research, as well as inequity in the publication of research, and in educational programmes. This is what can be termed knowledge inequity, as the stock of human knowledge is biased towards some population groups and away from others. Within universities there is gross inequity between high-paid executives and academic staff—many of whom are on precarious contracts, as universities have become business enterprises and education a commodity rather than serving a societal purpose and responding to societal needs such as the climate emergency and a reduction in socioeconomic inequity.

To give an example: In Australia and the UK, and probably elsewhere as well, university finances are propped up by profits from fee income from international students. Looking through an equity lens at the rate in different countries per 100,000 population at which students enrol in Australian universities, we discover that international students do not reflect global needs for higher education. There is variation between regions and countries in the rate at which students come to Australia, but this has no relation to the educational or financial needs of the country. In fact, the only relationship is that some countries with a high GDP have a high rate of international students in Australian universities. Individual ability to pay fees appears to be the driving force, and universities attract who they can and who will pay fees. As an example from SE Asia, Malaysia and Singapore together provided 47% of SE Asian international student numbers in Australia in 2022 but comprise only 6% of the total population of SE Asia. Indonesia, with a much lower GDP and greater need, provided 12% of SE Asian international student numbers in Australia but comprise 40% of SE Asia’s combined population. The pattern of enrolments serves no obvious strategic purpose for Australia, or the need for boosting a country’s knowledge stock; it is purely an income generation exercise for Australian universities.

Thomas Piketty provides an appropriate context in his book with Michael Sandel, Equality—What It Means and Why It Matters: ‘I think the fact that we’ve sort of given up on an ambitious egalitarian objective for higher education is at the source of many of our problems today—economic, and even more so democratic’.

Equity problems also arise in the creation of knowledge through research. Many of the same populations that miss out on education are also under-represented in research. Research has focused on Global North populations, and this extends to the researchers themselves and the funding they receive. A relevant example comes from research into neglected tropical diseases where the majority of research funding goes to researchers in countries where the diseases do not even exist.

The publication of research findings is dominated by big business, where there are five particularly large companies making massive profits from the journals they publish. Libraries are charged high fees to hold their journals, and where the publisher allows free access to the journal, it is the author of the research paper, or the author’s institution, who has to pay article processing charges. Again, this creates obvious inequity as the profit motive overrides equity.

As you see from these examples, the higher education sector is failing in its mission to reduce knowledge inequity. As Piketty suggests, inequity is responsible for many of our social and economic problems, while the higher education sector is not tackling, and is even contributing to, social inequity. Nor is the sector paying real attention to the climate emergency.

What if we could provide education to wherever and whenever it is needed, with low impact on the climate?  Where equity and societal priorities rather than a business model are reflected in the mission of universities? Where students from rural and remote areas and those at social disadvantage could equally access education, extended globally to those at real need? Where educational resources are open and can be shared, increasing access to best practice resources and reducing costs all round? Where research can involve under-represented populations, and research publications move away from predatory commercial publishers and are free—for researchers to publish and for those who require the information to read? What if there was a way to transform higher education towards these ideals?

I’d like to suggest that my book offers ways in which the sector could transform using an equity focus. The title of the book: Distributing Knowledge: Openness, Equity and Higher Education Transformation gives a good guide as to its theme and content. The book is built around a framework for distributing knowledge for equity, where education is largely online and utilises a distributed model with large campuses largely replaced by local hubs—which can be physical or virtual. Educational resources will be open and can be shared. Research will be able to involve under-represented populations as research hubs will also be distributed rather than centralised. Publication of research will use the ‘Diamond Open Access’ model—a community-driven, academic-led, and academic-owned model allowing open access to journals and textbooks avoiding the current paywalls. The carbon footprint of higher education would be drastically reduced. The distributed model would extend to leadership, reducing managerialism, increasing academic autonomy and reducing internal inequity. Collaborative development and sharing of Open Educational Resources reduce the drive to the commodification of education, and open publishing reduces the power of commercial publishers. These various initiatives will increase knowledge equity. The distributed model is consistent with societal moves towards decentralisation of the internet (Web 3.0 and 4.0) and federated IT infrastructures (such as the Fediverse for social media). The adoption of such a model would encourage new locally driven academic environments and research initiatives responsive to societal needs, and increase knowledge equity.

The book ends with an urgent call to action. I would welcome any suggestions of ways to advocate for distributing knowledge for equity and transform higher education. Please get in touch with me.

Read this book freely or buy a copy online.

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By David H. Silver

Popular science has a formula. Take a difficult idea, strip the mathematics, add a metaphor, and tell the reader how to feel about it. Gravity bends space "like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet." Quantum mechanics is "spooky." The universe is "mind-blowing." The reader leaves with a sense of wonder and no tools to verify any of it.

Textbooks sit at the other end. They assume two years of prerequisite coursework, define every symbol, prove every theorem, and are read by people who already know what they're looking for. They also strip the wonder in a different way. A student who has spent nights fighting integrals has little space left to appreciate how far from intuition they've wandered. The machinery repels the amazement. The gap between these two forms is enormous, and almost nothing occupies it.

Beyond Popular Science is an attempt to sit in that gap — and to be honest about the awkwardness of sitting there. The main exposition isn't long enough for full understanding. The technical sections are often too abstract. But if the book works, the reader leaves hungry enough to go find the real meal — a textbook, a paper, a late-night Wikipedia spiral.

The project started as a family flight magazine. Before a transatlantic trip, I put together a few notes on questions that seem simple on the surface but turn out to be scientifically intricate. The list kept growing, and the flight magazine became fifty chapters spanning mathematics, physics, computer science, chemistry, philosophy, and history.

Consider one of the most familiar objects on earth: a tree. Ask where a tree's mass comes from and intuition points downward — soil, water, nutrients drawn up through roots. This is almost entirely wrong. About 95% of a tree's dry mass is carbon and oxygen from atmospheric CO₂. A tree is made of air. Van Helmont demonstrated this in the 1640s: he planted a willow sapling in weighed soil, supplied only water, and after five years the tree had gained over 70 kilograms while the soil lost less than 60 grams. He didn't know the mechanism — that came centuries later with isotope labelling, which traced carbon atoms from CO₂ through stomata into sugar molecules via light-powered biochemical cycles, then into cellulose, lignin, and hemicellulose. The oxygen in wood comes from CO₂, not from water — the oxygen released by photosynthesis comes from splitting water molecules, confirmed by experiments with oxygen-18. When a tree burns, the carbon returns to the atmosphere and the stored sunlight is released as heat. The chapter walks the full chain, from photon to wood.

Each chapter follows the same structure. Historical context comes first — the people, circumstances, and discoveries behind the phenomenon. Then a description of the phenomenon itself, in straightforward terms. Finally, a one-page technical section that is unapologetically tough: equations, derivations, and references. This section functions like the references in a scientific article. It isn't required to grasp the main ideas, but it justifies the claims, provides scaffolding, and offers readers the tools to verify everything or explore further.

The book's position creates an unusual relationship with the reader. A popular science book can promise accessibility — anyone can follow along. A textbook can promise mastery — work through the problem sets and you'll understand. This book promises neither. It promises that the science is presented as it actually is, without manufactured excitement, and that the effort required to engage with it is part of the value.

Too much science communication relies on what I think of as a "laugh track" approach — telling readers how they should feel instead of letting the ideas do the work. "This is mind-blowing!" cheapens the experience, as though the Dirac equation or the Banach–Tarski paradox need a hype man. They don't. A solid sphere can be decomposed into finitely many pieces and reassembled into two copies of itself. That fact is strange enough without commentary. The quasi-liquid layer on the surface of ice — nanometres of disordered molecules that explain why ice is slippery, even when pressure melting and frictional heating fail — is fascinating because of what it is, not because someone told you to be fascinated.

Several people who work in science communication have told me this book feels like it was written for them. They know the popular version of every story in it, and they're tired of repeating metaphors they know are incomplete. They want to understand what's actually happening — the real mechanism, the actual equation, the part that gets cut from the magazine article. If you spend your career explaining science to others, you develop a craving for the unexpurgated version.

The fifty chapters can be read independently. Some are approachable — the etymology of "wheel" and "cycle," the Christmas truce of 1914, why fireflies glow. Others are demanding — Poncelet's closure theorem in projective billiards, the Woodward–Hoffmann rules in orbital symmetry, observer-dependent vacuum states in quantum field theory. The chapter summaries are accessible to anyone. The technical sections are not, and are not intended to be.

This range is deliberate. A reader with a background in physics might skip the historical context of general relativity but spend time with the chapter on the Jewish calendar's astronomical calculations. A mathematician might breeze through the topology chapter but find the chemistry of DNA sequencing unfamiliar. The book is designed so that every reader finds chapters where they're comfortable and chapters where they're not. The uncomfortable ones are the point.

The book contains errors. The introduction says so, and means it. Precision across fifty topics spanning half a dozen fields is unrealisable for a single author. Readers are invited to report mistakes, and I expect they will. This is a feature of writing in the gap: you trade the safety of a narrow specialism for the risk of getting something wrong in someone else's field. The trade-off is worth it if the result is a book where a single chapter can take you from a Bronze Age Proto-Indo-European root word to modern comparative linguistics, or from a 4chan post about anime to a breakthrough in combinatorics.

I wrote this book because I'm the person who corners friends at dinner to explain why ice is slippery or how GPS satellites account for time dilation. Anyone who knows me knows this happens regardless of the time or place. The book is an attempt to do the same thing in print — to share the parts of science that made me sit up, but without pretending they're simpler than they are.

Consider what happens when a ray of sunlight hits your eye and you move. The photon was generated in a star's core where the weak nuclear force converted protons to neutrons after quantum tunnelling through an energy barrier. It was trapped in plasma for a million years in random-walk collisions, finally escaping the surface and flying straight for eight minutes across the vacuum — zero time from the photon's point of view. It strikes your retina and flips rhodopsin from cis to trans, a femtosecond molecular rearrangement amplified into a millisecond spike. Neurons fire, motor cortex computes, acetylcholine floods neuromuscular junctions, actin and myosin filaments slide, and you move. Every layer of physics and biology has fired in unison — from subnuclear quark fields to stellar photon journeys to cellular cities to muscular contraction — so that when you think "I should move," your body tilts its trajectory through spacetime.

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This is less mundane than any grumpy villain who can fly forks around telekinetically. The universe doesn't need exaggeration. It needs explanation.

David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose work spans computational biology, computer vision, and science communication. Beyond Popular Science is freely available from Open Book Publishers.

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By Héloïse Berkowitz

Twenty years have passed since the pioneering work by ‍the Swedish sociologists Ahrne and ‍Brunsson on meta-organizations : that is, organizations whose members are themselves organizations. Catalan ‍fisheries ‍co-management committees, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the Association of Supervisors of Banks of the Americas (ASBA), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), ‍Finance Participative ‍France, La Vía Campesina and the ‍European Union (‍EU) are examples that illustrate the diversity, breadth and scope of meta-organizations’ presence and importance in contemporary societies. ‍Ahrne and ‍Brunsson, and the growing community of researchers on meta-organizations, emphasized the need for and specific nature of this concept compared to other social phenomena and theoretical approaches.

The book A Society of Meta-Organizations argues that it can be useful to look at meta-organizations through different lenses :

1) as a multifaceted empirical phenomenon of significant importance that affects contemporary societies;

2) as a specific analytical approach that shifts the emphasis on certain dimensions of collective action and can be used for studying evolutionary dynamics, or studied in relation with other concepts and literatures;

3) as a theoretical perspective about ‍social orders that sheds lights on the complexity of systems of decisions; and

4) as specific spaces of ‍power dynamics that enable ‍hegemonic and ‍counter-hegemonic ‍collaborations.

Meta-organizations are everywhere, and they have important effects on societies. Empirically, they are both quantitatively widespread and qualitatively diverse. They can range from local, highly specialized collectives to large, generalist global actors. Meta-organizations are incredibly diverse, in terms of size, membership, purposes, activities, which makes it impossible to treat them as a single, homogeneous category. Yet across this diversity, some shared characteristics emerge. These similarities point to the analytical value of meta-organizations as a concept—one that helps make sense of contemporary forms of collective action.

Originally introduced by Göran Ahrne and Nils Brunsson, the concept of meta-organization marked a decisive break with dominant ways of thinking about organized collective action among organizations. Rather than treating ‘organizations of organizations’ as if they were conventional, individual-based organizations, or, conversely, as loose networks or institutions without decision-making capacity, the concept highlights their specific nature as decided social orders composed of organizational members. This specificity makes meta-organizations analytically powerful, but also methodologically challenging. Over time, the concept has been developed into an analytical framework that allows researchers to study their internal dynamics, their evolution, and their relationships with other forms of organized intermediation.

Building on this work, the book proposes an integrated, decision-based approach to understanding social orders and meta-organizations. It shows how social orders can be analyzed across multiple dimensions: from the underlying parameters that shape how social orders exist and change, to their structural components, their capacity for collective action and identity, their contextual characteristics, and finally the distinctive effects produced when social orders are nested within one another. This perspective makes visible how decision-making, responsibility, and actorhood are distributed and transformed across levels.

Such an approach also reveals the ambivalence of meta-organizations. On the one hand, they play a central role in organizing collaborations across boundaries and addressing complex collective problems. On the other hand, they contribute to the production and maintenance of unfair global social orders, while diluting responsibility and making accountability nearly impossible. Meta-organizations may become powerful vehicles of hegemonic strategies—sometimes turning into what can be described as organizational monsters. Yet under certain conditions, they can also serve as spaces for counter-hegemonic collaboration, enabling alternative forms of coordination, resistance, and social ordering.

Taken together, these analyses support a central claim of the book: we do not simply live in a society of organizations, but in a society of meta-organizations. Understanding their diversity, their specific characteristics and their effects on social orders is essential to understand how contemporary societies are governed—and for imagining how they might be organized otherwise.

This work received support from the Prix de la Recherche en Provence and the ANR: ANR-22-CE26-0004.

Read for free or buy a copy of A Society of Meta-Organizations by Héloïse Berkowitz on the Open Book Publishers website.

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By Anita Frison

When I started working on Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850-1917), I only had a general understanding of a phenomenon – that of the (re-)construction and reshaping of sub-Saharan Africa in late tsarist culture – which seemed to be largely associated with marginal, peripheral individuals united by scientific curiosity and a penchant for exoticism. Even the poet Nikolai Gumilev, arguably the most famous Russian writer commonly associated with Africa, seemed an anomaly in his extensive and layered work on this continent.

However, I quickly realised that their efforts were by no means marginal, either in the context of fin-de-siècle Russia or within the parameters of European colonial knowledge production. In fact, the discourses, rhetoric and practices of Russian subjects in relation to Africa were deeply embedded in Western colonial culture, not least because, as emerges most vividly in the fourth chapter (Collectors), there was a direct and fruitful collaboration between them. In this regard, examining imperial Russia’s cultural and political attitudes towards Africa supports the ‘colonialism without colonies’ paradigm, as it vividly illustrates how colonial discourse transcended actual colonial ties and was adopted, perpetuated, and promoted by nations lacking colonies (in this case, African ones). Consequently, the notion of Russian exceptionalism, which was most prominent in Soviet anti-colonial rhetoric but was actually rooted in late 19^th-century writings, is largely subverted.

The second most notable feature to emerge was that the construction of knowledge about Africa in late imperial Russia was relevant to both highbrow and lowbrow circles. This is reflected throughout the volume, from the first chapter, which introduces figures from various social backgrounds who were associated with Africa, to the subsequent analysis of their works, including travelogues, maps, anthropological studies, encyclopaedia entries, museum collections, and literary efforts. Sub-Saharan Africa was shaped for a wide audience which included highly educated people such as scholars and highbrow artists, as well as commoners. Indeed, it featured prominently in cultural products aimed at the lower classes and played a significant role in the late 19^th-century effort to democratise knowledge for the masses. Thus, through dubious literary works, second-rate essays and social novelties such as the opening of museums to the public, a certain rhetoric of race – mirroring its no less unfounded highbrow counterpart – began to permeate the people’s understanding of Africa, indelibly shaping their perception of the continent.

The five chapters of the book, presenting an array of figures and analysing their work, all convey these two perspectives, which act as a red thread throughout: Russia’s participation in the Western system of knowledge about Africa, and the pervasiveness of the ensuing racial discourse in various media and social classes. In this respect, I believe it is important (and even crucial) to always put cultural and political phenomena occurring in Russia – often victim of the exceptionalist rhetoric (on the Russian side) or of othering (on the Western side) – into a wider, global context. As we live in an interconnected and complex world, it is essential to remember that discourses and practices are largely shared and developed in unison – for better or worse.

Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850-1917) by Anita Frison can be freely read or bought on the Open Book Publishers website.

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By Anna Beresin

As an ethnographer, psychologist, and folklorist, I have spent forty years studying children’s play and childlore, often the only adult outsider on a children’s playground, paper or sound recorder in hand. The field of play and culture studies places the objects and motifs of childhood within their own contexts, balancing at the intersection of the social sciences and the humanities. I have written about play after the Rodney King Case, and after 9/11 in the United States, and with Julia Bishop edited a global volume about play during the Covid-19 pandemic. These books include songs sung, games crafted, and objects and drawings made. Thanks to this gracious publisher, Play in a Covid Frame is available for purchase and free download.

My new book Make/Unmake: Play at the Centre of Culture Change examines what UNICEF calls the three greatest challenges currently facing children globally, now and into the future: migration, the climate crisis, and changing forms of work.  Make/Unmakeoffers what I hope to be two different poetic paths of engaging with the material presented as three different communities wrestled with immigration, recycled materials, and their own future work ambivalence. The physical book and free download offer images, original photographs of children’s sculptural play with those children’s identities masked. There is also an audio book, but that has no images, yet it reflects the rhythm of the poetic narration offered by the adults who cared for these children and for their creations. Both the written book and the audiobook honor the verbatim words of named adults in the communities studied: The Pitsmoor Adventure Playground and the Maker{Futures} Mobile Makerspace of Sheffield, England, and the GLUE Collective of nearby Birmingham. As is traditional in ethnographic practice, the author gives equal weight to the words of living participants in these communities as it does to respected scholars in the field of play. Both the audiobook and the physical book can be found here (the audiobook is available as a free MP3 download).

Why mask the children’s identities, but not the adults’ identities in this book, you might ask? These three programs serve children in vulnerable communities, and masking children’s identities keeps them safe.  All of the children in the study gave verbal and written permission to be photographed and filmed, as did their parents, and each child’s face was covered in a variety of methods ranging from blurring the children’s faces to just photographing the children’s hands. In order to honor the poetry of children’s physicality connected to their object play, I experimented with placing images of children’s homemade objects on their faces as digital masks- both in the still photography and in the short research film made. The adults agreed that the methods sufficiently protected the children, and this assured the research review boards that the priority of protection came first. The adults in the three communities studied rightly wished to get credit for their hard work, for their roles as leaders in their communities and so, they are proudly named. Each program has read drafts of the book before publication, satisfied with their work and mine, a multi-layered process of editing, revoicing, and reclaiming. I imagine further discussions emerging about the social sciences’ desire to protect people’s identities as the humanities holler to give people credit where credit is due for their creations.

I was influenced by the field of ethnopoetics in folklore and conversation analysis, and also by the work in sociolinguistics about the poetry of everyday speech. One of my practices is to repeat powerful excerpts from the chapters as a form of book summary, and to link them by theme at the book’s end, a natural found poem, a printed form of spontaneous spoken word as spoken by the people studied. Listen for the rhythm, the rhyme, the subtle repetition in this excerpt from the conclusion:

That much freedom? Really? Really?
Sometimes parents say, ‘Where’s the activity?’
I just point to the all the materials.
Don’t they see?

‘Well, they’re just playing’.
But you’ve not watched.
You may have observed,
But you’ve just not seen what other people are seeing. . .

The words are poetry. The objects are poetry. Will you be led by your ears or by your eyes?

Make/Unmake: Play at the Centre of Culture Change by Anna Beresin can be freely read or bought online.

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By Floriana Cerniglia and Francesco Saraceno

In a context marked by economic and geopolitical tensions, the European Union is called upon to make energy a pillar of its strategic autonomy. Accelerating on the adoption of renewables is essential not only to meet environmental commitments, but also to address the productivity gap with the United States and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, which exposes the EU to supply shocks and geopolitical blackmailing. Lower reliance on fossil fuel means lower energy costs and less import dependency, with positive effects not only on the environment but also on productivity and economic security: the transition is not just an environmental choice, but a lever for economic sovereignty and strategic autonomy.

According to this perspective, energy policy cannot be separated from the new industrial policy invoked by the Draghi Report. Leaving the structural transformation of the EU economy to markets alone is not enough: it is necessary to facilitate it by reshaping and shortening supply chains, eliminating bottlenecks in strategic sectors, shifting resources toward high-value-added activities, and developing active labor market policies.

These themes are the focus of the sixth Outlook on Public Investment in Europe (More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition. 2025 European Public Investment Outlook). The Outlook highlights, on the one hand, how the EU continues to move in a scattered way; on the other hand, more fundamentally, both public and private investment is insufficient. EU Member states have different sources of energy and often have divergent interests, stemming from specific industrial histories and unequal resource endowments. Consequently – as noted in the first part of the Outlook – the decarbonization is certainly progressing in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, but with strong differences in industrial policies, regulatory frameworks, and incentives. The difficulty of building a truly common and adequately financed energy policy emerges, for example, in the chapter written by our colleagues from the EIB.

In the few years since the introduction of the Green Deal in 2019, the context has become significantly more complicated. The Green Deal's main objective was reducing emissions, with an eye on the consequences for distribution and welfare. Today, the EU must juggle several, at times competing, objectives: decarbonizing; reviving an industry that has moved late and is now under pressure from the green transition and from competition from the United States and China; ensuring supply- and value-chain security in an unstable geopolitical environment; and mitigating the distributional impact of industrial restructuring. The second part of the Outlook links the energy transition to horizontal themes such as mission-orientedpolicies for industrial competitiveness, research and innovation, and vertical policies on green hydrogen, grid infrastructure, and access to critical raw materials. In a situation of tighter budget constraints and new spending priorities (particularly defence), and without proactive policies for fair distribution of costs and benefits, public consensus for the transition risks weakening; to avoid this, focus on local energy communities and equitable use of carbon resources are of paramount importance.

The Outlook's chapters are written by authors from different backgrounds and institutions, but the thread that links them is clear: without strong European coordination and stable public investment, the energy transition risks slowing down and weighing on the economy precisely when it should instead accelerate and act as a driver for sustained and sustainable growth.

European institutions do not seem equipped to support a genuine common energy and industrial policy. Following the short COVID-19-related parenthesis of Next Generation EU, the return to "frugal" positions by several EU actors and the limited ambition of the new Multiannual Financial Framework make an EU-wide push for industrial and energy policy unlikely. The necessary investments will therefore have to be carried out by Member States, which, however, are constrained by the Stability and Growth Pact.

For this reason, in our introduction, we propose an Augmented Golden Rule that would exclude investment, both tangible and intangible, from the 3% deficit limit of the Stability Pact. The logic would not be very different from the recent decision to exempt defence spending from the Pact's limits, in the framework of the SAFE initiative. However, unlike that measure, it would be institutionalized, to become the outcome of a democratic process regarding the EU’s investment priorities: the Council and Parliament would periodically (for example when approving the EU budget) reach an agreement on priority sectors in which there is the need to increase the stock of (tangible and/or intangible) capital; national governments could then finance these priorities through debt, in exemption from the Pact.

To prevent market pressure on individual countries, the Augmented Golden Rule should be accompanied by a European Debt Agency that would issue Eurobonds and lend to national countries to finance the commonly agreed investment priorities. The modulation of interest rates on these loans would ensure fiscal discipline, while protecting governments from undue market pressure.

Without a rethinking of the EU economic governance, a strategy that integrates the energy transition, competitiveness, and security will inevitably remain incomplete.

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Access this book and others in the series.

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By Tricia De Souza

A child stands upright, arm extended with his hand holding gently but firmly to the neck of a snake coiled around his naked body. Beside him, an elderly man has brought his lips to a flute-like instrument, playing before an ensemble of men leant against a tiled wall composed of blues so remarkable it is hard to look away.

Through its vivid artistry, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1879 painting “The Snake Charmer” presented European and American audiences with a captivating but entirely contrived image of a region many of its viewers would most likely never visit: an amorphous Middle East steeped in exoticism, sensuality and exploitation.

Today, Gérôme’s painting has now been squarely placed within the genre of ‘orientalism’, a term coined by Palestinian and American scholar Edward Said in 1978 that refers to the ways in which European (and American) colonial powers have sought authority to define through imagery, literature and scholarship what “the Orient” is, and markedly, what it is not: the West.

While countries like France, Spain and England have been more steeply inculcated in this unequal production of power, Anita Frison’s open access book Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850–1917) unmasks how pre-Soviet Russia produced similarly exotifying portrayals of Sub-Saharan Africa all the while distinguishing itself as a benevolent actor– merely an explorer– in contrast to its violent and colonial counterparts in the West. Through a careful analysis of travelogues, literature, maps and museum collections, Frison begs to differ.

_____

“Abyssinia is a fairytale,” wrote the Russian military officer Petr Krasnov in his travelogue, Kazaki v Abissinii (1900). While documenting his time in Ethiopia, Krasnov spoke in detail of the world around him: the striking heat of the sun soothed only by the coolness of the night, far off blue mountains that enticed his curiosities, the domineering light of a full moon that was unlike anything he had witnessed before. Written in a euphoric state, he reiterated, “you feel that you are in a magical fairytale” (qtd. in Frison, 78).

Krasnov’s Kazaki v Abissinii was one of a plethora of writings on Africa by Russian travelers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Another was a memoir by writer and diplomat Egor Kovalevskii who described the interior of this expansive continent as a place akin to the garden of Eden, where a multitude of unknown fruits seemed to spring forth from the ground without “need for ploughing or sowing” (qtd. in Frison 79). Like Krasnov’s depictions, Africa was a place of dreams.

These Russian explorers of Africa did not stop at writing about their experiences; they also transcribed them onto maps. Just like their reflections, these geographical renderings flattened cultural and political complexities.

Vladimir  Troitskii, a graduate of the Moscow Faculty of Natural Sciences, almost entirely erased Central Africa from his map; instead, he only provided details of his specific routes. Eduard Petri, vice-president of the Russian Anthropological Society, designed a school atlas that divided the African population into four ethno-racial groups all with their own “sub-species” (qtd. in Frison 63).  Petri, however, had never stepped foot into Africa. This did not stop him from requesting state funding to further his projects on the study of the “‘uncultured’ people” (qtd. in Frison 64)

In a country largely affected by high rates of illiteracy, cartography allowed everyday Russians to also engage in this “science of colonialism”  (qtd. in Frison 65). For example, The School Atlas of General Geography, published in 1859 by zoologist Iulian Simashko, was intended to be used in schools and gymnasiums. Simashko blended botany, geography and zoology by randomly placing colorful images of the native flora and fauna throughout the atlas. The geography of Africa remained obscure, divided primarily by European colonies. With swathes of land left empty, Russian pupils were encouraged to fill these spaces with their own imagination rather than engaging with accurate depictions of African nations and tribes (Frison 68). Thus, without even needing formal colonies, Russian explorers utilized maps to re-produce their colonial aspirations onto Africa.

This phenomenon is best represented through the words of Kovalevskii. Upon naming a region, “the Land of Nicholas,” he then went on to call a river “the Nevka,” a name “which would point to a European traveler having reached this place” (qtd. in Frison 57). Thus, Russian imperial actors not only saw themselves as individuals, they also understood that they were contributing to a larger project of nation-building and European expansion.

_____

By probing an oftentimes uncontested educational resource like maps, Africa in Russian Imperial Culture acts as an important reminder that stereotyping and dehumanization can be embedded in seemingly innocuous tools of knowledge.

It is through this revelation that one can better understand Said’s underlying argument, that “everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into … the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text” that “add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf” (Said, 28).

By incorporating this critical thinking into the information we both create and are given, we can begin to accept and interrogate the subjectivity of the objective.

Anita Frison's book Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850–1917) can be read freely online, or you can buy a copy: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0504

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Welcome to our Annual Report!

We hope this newsletter finds you well. We write with a big announcement about our new individual membership programme, news of recent publications, and a review of some of the highlights of our year.

Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report

Global Geographical Readership Statistics

We collect and display detailed readership statistics—also known as usage data or metrics—on each book’s home page. There, you can see how often a book has been downloaded or read online across multiple platforms, including our website, the OAPEN Library, and Google Books. Some geographical data is also available, showing where books have been accessed. Further down this page, you can find more information on how we collect and aggregate this data for each title.

Below are our global readership statistics for 2025, highlighting engagement with our titles across countries, states, and territories worldwide—a testament to the truly global reach of our publications.

In 2025, readership was distributed across continents as follows:

• North America: 41.17%
• Europe: 30.95%
• Asia: 17.91%
• Africa: 6.06%
• Latin America and the Caribbean: 2%
• Oceania: 1.90%

Annual Readership by Measure Report

This year, our books have been accessed 3,984,028 times across various platforms. Below are the top 10 countries by readership:

• United States of America 51.52%
• United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 7.82%
• Singapore 3.96%
• Italy 3.51%
• China 3.40%
• Spain 2.35%
• Germany 2.31%
• France 2.14%
• India 2.09%
• Brazil 1.55%
• Others 19.35%

Please note that access to our books in HTML format was tracked only until July 2023, as the platform previously used is no longer available. Our developers at OBP are actively working on new solutions. We continue to record usage across some platforms, tracking metrics such as:

• Access frequency and format
• Geographic distribution (where available)
• Specific domains (helpful for Library Members monitoring student and staff engagement)

These data are partial. Many hosting platforms do not provide usage information, and geographic data may be limited by platform restrictions or user privacy settings. Once a file is downloaded, we cannot track its further use or sharing—similar to print or ebook sales figures.

For more information on how we collect and process readership statistics, please visit Our Reach.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting our publications. With the help of our readers, member libraries, and authors, we continue working toward a fairer and more accessible publishing landscape.

Support OBP: new membership programme!

We’re excited to share that our new individual membership programme is now live on Patreon—and we’d love for you to join us! Making high-quality, peer-reviewed academic research freely available has never mattered more. This year alone, we’ve released more than sixty open access books without charging authors mandatory fees.

If you’d like to support our work, you can now join one of our five new monthly membership tiers—ranging from £1 to £50. Members enjoy great perks: including free EPUBs of our latest books, discounts on print editions, access to our annual online conference, updates on open access developments, and invitations to exclusive conversations with our publishing team.

Most importantly, you’ll be helping to fuel our open access mission—just like the libraries in our library membership programme—making high-quality scholarly research freely available to readers everywhere.

Find out more and join our individual membership programme.

Thank you: to our peer reviewers and our volunteers

Every year, our publications are made possible thanks to the committed and generous work of the referees who review the manuscripts we receive. This includes those manuscripts we ultimately do not publish, as well as those whose release is announced in these newsletters. This year, an incredible 150 experts peer-reviewed our book manuscripts, and we thank all of our referees for their invaluable contributions. Some of our referees choose to be named, and we then share their names with the relevant author and include them in the published book. Since May of this year, we have begun recording their names on our website and you can view them there.

We also sincerely thank the five volunteers who have helped us with a range of editorial, production and marketing tasks in 2025: Hannah Bergin, Sophia Bursey; Tricia De Souza; Lila Fierek; and Elisabeth Pitts. We are very grateful to them for their work. You can view their names on our website along with those of volunteers from previous years.

Warm thanks to them all!

Three new series partnerships!

The recently published Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta is the first book in our Publications of the Philological Society series, published in partnership with the Philological Society (PhilSoc), the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages.

This is one of three new series partnerships we announced this year: the other two are Papers of the British School at Rome in partnership with the British School at Rome, which will showcase original research and creative work on Italy from prehistory to the present; and Politics & Fiction in partnership with the CAPONEU Consortium, a multilingual series that will explore what ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ mean in relation to fictions as found in literature, theatre, performance, poetry, film and visual art, and cultural production as a whole.

We are immensely proud to begin bringing this work to a global audience via open access. If you want to know more about partnering with us to publish a series, you can find out more on our website or contact our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi.

Prize awards & nominations for our books

Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould were awarded the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize for their chapter, 'The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran' in Prismatic Jane Eyre, edited by Matthew Reynolds, which shows how Iranian readers incorporated Bronte's novel into their understandings of love.

This year, three of our authors were shortlisted for the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies categories. They were:

Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print traces the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500, dismembered in the nineteenth century & now reconstructed via Rudy's research.

Joanna Page, Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art shows how contemporary artists in Latin America reinvent older methods of collecting and displaying nature to create new aesthetic and political perspectives.

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, a 6-volume study exploring a single, electrifying story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem to its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Michael Hughes was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography prize for his book, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life, a biography of a hitherto neglected Russian revolutionary figure.

Luke Clossey received an honourable mention from the judges of the Phyllis Goodheart Gordon book prize for the best book in Renaissance Studies for his work, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520, a sweeping and unconventional investigation of Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history.

And finally Sandra Abegglen and her co-editors were nominated for an OEGlobal Open Education Award for Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education, a collection of essays that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future.

Enormous congratulations to these authors for this recognition of their fine research and writing. We are proud to publish and celebrate their work, and we are also delighted that through these awards and nominations we could fly the flag for independent open access presses: we are honoured to represent this growing community.

Building open access networks & infrastructures in 2025

Open Book Publishers is now on Instagram! Follow us!

If you are too, please follow us there! We'll be sharing information about new books, conversations with authors, and glimpses 'behind the curtain' at the publishing process...

OBP is a 'Top 100 UK social enterprise' for the fifth year in a row!

We are thrilled to announce that we are once again on this year's SE100 list! For more information, and to see the other excellent organisations who have been selected, see this webpage.

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By Bendi Tso, Marnyi Gyatso, Naljor Tsering, Mark Turin

When we first shared Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné online in October 2023 and later brought hard copies back to oral narrators and textual collectors who had supported our work in the summer of 2024, many expressed their appreciation for its trilingual format and the transparency it embodied.

The act of returning the book was understood not simply as a gesture of completion but as a form of accountability. The book functions as a form of recognition that the stories, knowledge, and insights generated through a research project need to circulate back to community members who made them possible. Also, the trilingual format of the book, combined with the accessibility of the e-version, made it easy for readers across Choné and across the generations to engage with the work through downloading and sharing, reinforcing the community’s ownership of its own cultural knowledge, and helping to extend the book’s visibility beyond physical and geographical constraints.

Those who read the book closely observed that it did not resemble academic writing as they imagined it, but rather read as a rich description grounded in their own words and lived experiences, while also situated within the wider Tibetan knowledge system. This shifted how they perceived themselves and the value of their knowledge, with one member commenting, “Our culture does indeed have deep meanings and roots,” and another reflecting, “It feels good to hold in my hands proof that my narration matters.”

This reception highlighted that Shépa was not only learned from the community, but developed collaboratively with the community. While our academic training helped situate these voices within broader conversations on Tibetan oral traditions and cultural continuity, it was the community’s participation that made the work so meaningful. This dialogic process became a form of co-learning, where knowledge was not extracted and represented but continually exchanged, negotiated, and co-produced, reinforcing both the ethical and intellectual commitments of collaborative research.

At the same time, a significant number of readers expressed a wish for an audio version, telling us that hearing the voices would make the experience more inclusive, especially for those not literate in Tibetan, Chinese, or English, and for those who live outside Choné. Their feedback has inspired us to develop a mobile app which is currently being built, enabling access through sound and interactive features. This aspiration reveals an important lesson in community-engaged research: it is not a linear, outcome-driven product but a relational process that continues to evolve as the work circulates and is reinterpreted by the community.

Returning the book to the people from whom it emerged and listening to their feedback not only fulfills an ethical commitment, but also reaffirms that Shépa is a living expression of Choné memory and a collaborative process shaped by the knowledge and voices of the community itself.

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By Alison Twells

A Place of Dreams has been many years in the making, the long gestation quite simply because it took me so long to work out what kind of book it should, or could, be.

The book explores the wartime coming-of-age of Norah Hodgkinson, a working-class schoolgirl from the East Midlands. It is crafted from a ‘suitcase archive’ containing 71 pocket diaries, which Norah began writing in 1938, when she was 12 years old. Alongside the diaries was a collection of letters from a sailor who—it turned out—had received a pair of socks Norah had knitted for the Royal Navy Comforts Fund in 1940, and a stash of photographs of him—I’ve called him Jim—and his brother—Danny—who was in the RAF and with whom Norah fell in love.

Piecing together Jim’s letters and Norah’s diary entries, it soon became clear that these were not the kind of men you’d want writing to your fifteen-year-old daughter. But Norah, coming of age in a period in which finding love and romance was the pinnacle of female achievement, was utterly thrilled by her entry into this new grown-up and very modern world.

Norah’s diaries are unique. Despite over sixty years of ‘history from below’, we still have so few accounts of ordinary peoples’ lives told in their own voices and on their own terms. Evidence written by working-class people is more likely to end up in a house clearance skip than an archive. Working-class girls are surely among the most under-represented in history. We have plenty written about them, material which often represents them as a problem in some way. In Norah’s era, we see newspaper articles shrieking fears about the alleged lax morality of girls and young women during the war, and commentaries of social workers, journalists, reformers, the police, the records of juvenile court proceedings and government departments, the concerns of which are usually very far from the girls’ own. As the daughter of a postman and a former domestic servant, might Norah’s diaries allow a different kind of access to a working-class girl’s interior life?

As well as unravelling Norah’s wartime experience, A Place of Dreams asks: what kind of writing would best allow me to tell Norah’s story?

Norah’s diaries are a challenge to read. It is not simply that much of what she wrote about was very mundane. Her daily concerns—the weather, her routines and household chores, the comings and goings of family and friends, her health, love interests and occasional world events—were all shared with other diarists, like the middle-class women who wrote for Mass Observation during the war. But Norah’s diary entries—written in tiny squares that allow for no more than twenty words a day—are more akin to almanacs and pocketbooks than the discursive, introspective diaries that find their way to publication. Laconic and telegraphic, they have little in the way of plot, dramatic tension, character development or self-reflection. Her use of parataxis, the juxtaposition of unrelated daily events, accord the ordinary and extraordinary equal value within any given daily window. The personal pronoun, the ‘I’, is almost entirely absent. Full sentences too. Norah relies on phrases composed of verb/object pairings (‘wrote to Danny’), with an occasional adjective thrown in (‘beautiful letter from my love’). Her style is so terse as to seem almost coded, her disjointed, staccato sentences hard to decipher without insider knowledge.

Given my training, the obvious way forward would be to write about Norah’s diaries, academic-style. Academic historians have much to commend us. We know our sources: their strengths and shortcomings, how they came into being, what they might mean. We are good at probing beneath the surface, steering clear of simplicity, unsettling false certainties. But putting Norah’s archive through the academic mill, subjecting her daily entries to an outside telling, would not get close to her life as she lived it. It could not bring her diaries to life. Nor would it lead to a story that Norah would recognise as her own, or even want to read.

A Place of Dreams builds on long-standing criticisms of academic writing; criticisms which say that our commitment to detachment and distance, to the solemn, argumentative voice of a purportedly neutral ‘hidden narrator’, doesn’t actually do what we claim it does. I ask if story can carry interpretation, if family stories and methods drawn from life writing might allow the kind of ‘insider’ perspective that Norah’s diaries feel to me to need, and if I can do all of this and still call it history…

‘History from below’, I have come to believe, requires more than a focus on an ordinary life written in an academic voice. It requires attention to both form and voice: an exploration of forms that allow other ways of knowing – through family stories and imagination, perhaps; and a writerly presence that is transparent, honest and warm.

For girls as a problem, see Carol Dyhouse, ‘Was There Ever a Time when Girls Weren't in Trouble?’, Women's History Review, 23:2 (2014), 272-274.

For criticism of academic writing, see: Alison Twells, Will Pooley, Matt Houlbrook and Helen Rogers, ‘Undisciplined History: Creative Methods and Academic Practice’, History Workshop Journal, 96:1 (2023), 153-175, and references therein.

For family stories as ‘inside history’, see Alison Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014).

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Read A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells freely online or buy a copy on our website.

Home, away, and third kits each tell a different part of a club story when a tournament or league season gives the design a lasting meaning. The history around Chelsea gives many shirts a meaning that goes beyond fabric and colour. When comparing home, away, and third kit styles, football shirts for supporters remains a clear search phrase for readers comparing styles and versions. For collectors comparing older shirts, the discussion stays close to teams, supporters, and shared history.

Welcome to our December Newsletter!

We hope this newsletter finds you well as the festive month of December begins. We write with a big announcement about our new individual membership programme, news of recent publications, and a review of some of the highlights of our year.

Support OBP: new membership programme!

We’re excited to share that our new individual membership programme is now live on Patreon—and we’d love for you to join us! Making high-quality, peer-reviewed academic research freely available has never mattered more. This year alone, we’ve released more than sixty open access books without charging authors mandatory fees.

If you’d like to support our work, you can now join one of our five new monthly membership tiers—ranging from £1 to £50. Members enjoy great perks: including free EPUBs of our latest books, discounts on print editions, access to our annual online conference, updates on open access developments, and invitations to exclusive conversations with our publishing team.

Most importantly, you’ll be helping to fuel our open access mission—just like the libraries in our library membership programme—making high-quality scholarly research freely available to readers everywhere.

Find out more and join our individual membership programme.

Here's what happened this year:

Sixty-four new books this year, including TEN in November:

Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta (the first title in our new series in partnership with the Philological Society).

Hylo Narrans: Echoes of Material Marronage by Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn.

Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink & Laura Karreman.

Xouth, The Ape: A Tale of Manners by Iakovos Pitsipios & Neo G. Christodoulides.

Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics by Samuel Bowles & Weikai Chen.

The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East by Alba Fedeli, Geoffrey Khan & Johan Lundberg.

A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment by Charles Webster.

A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells.

Joyce’s Choices: New Textual Parallels in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and ‘Ulysses' by R. H. Winnick.

Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt by Linda Herrera.

And we have continued this activity in December, publishing several new titles:

Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty's Constructive Project edited by Elin D. Huckerby and Marianne Janack

More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition ― 2025 European Public Investment Outlook edited by Floriana Cerniglia and Francesco Saraceno.

Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma by Maria Manuel Lisboa.

All of our titles are free to read and download; we invite you to explore our complete catalogue.

Thank you: to our peer reviewers and our volunteers

Every year, our publications are made possible thanks to the committed and generous work of the referees who review the manuscripts we receive. This includes those manuscripts we ultimately do not publish, as well as those whose release is announced in these newsletters. This year, an incredible 150 experts peer-reviewed our book manuscripts, and we thank all of our referees for their invaluable contributions. Some of our referees choose to be named, and we then share their names with the relevant author and include them in the published book. Since May of this year, we have begun recording their names on our website and you can view them there.

We also sincerely thank the five volunteers who have helped us with a range of editorial, production and marketing tasks in 2025: Hannah Bergin, Sophia Bursey; Tricia De Souza; Lila Fierek; and Elisabeth Pitts. We are very grateful to them for their work. You can view their names on our website along with those of volunteers from previous years.

Warm thanks to them all!

Three new series partnerships!

The recently published Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta is the first book in our Publications of the Philological Society series, published in partnership with the Philological Society (PhilSoc), the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages.

This is one of three new series partnerships we announced this year: the other two are Papers of the British School at Rome in partnership with the British School at Rome, which will showcase original research and creative work on Italy from prehistory to the present; and Politics & Fiction in partnership with the CAPONEU Consortium, a multilingual series that will explore what ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ mean in relation to fictions as found in literature, theatre, performance, poetry, film and visual art, and cultural production as a whole.

We are immensely proud to begin bringing this work to a global audience via open access. If you want to know more about partnering with us to publish a series, you can find out more on our website or contact our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi.

Prize awards & nominations for our books

Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould were awarded the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize for their chapter, 'The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran' in Prismatic Jane Eyre, edited by Matthew Reynolds, which shows how Iranian readers incorporated Bronte's novel into their understandings of love.

This year, three of our authors were shortlisted for the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies categories. They were:

Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print traces the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500, dismembered in the nineteenth century & now reconstructed via Rudy's research.

Joanna Page, Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art shows how contemporary artists in Latin America reinvent older methods of collecting and displaying nature to create new aesthetic and political perspectives.

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, a 6-volume study exploring a single, electrifying story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem to its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Michael Hughes was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography prize for his book, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life, a biography of a hitherto neglected Russian revolutionary figure.

Luke Clossey received an honourable mention from the judges of the Phyllis Goodheart Gordon book prize for the best book in Renaissance Studies for his work, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520, a sweeping and unconventional investigation of Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history.

And finally Sandra Abegglen and her co-editors were nominated for an OEGlobal Open Education Award for Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education, a collection of essays that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future.

Enormous congratulations to these authors for this recognition of their fine research and writing. We are proud to publish and celebrate their work, and we are also delighted that through these awards and nominations we could fly the flag for independent open access presses: we are honoured to represent this growing community.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Building open access networks & infrastructures in 2025

Highlights from the Open Access Books Network (OABN), which we coordinate in partnership with OAPEN, Sparc Europe and OPERAS, included:

• The OABN published an FAQ and blog post based on an expert webinar that focused on including third-party materials in open access books;
• Three authors who received ERC grants shared their experiences of publishing open access books and series;
• The OABN held an expert webinar on good metadata practice for open access publishers;
• It held two events focused on policymaking for open access books, including services for policymaking and a community event on contributing to the PALOMERA Knowledge Base.

Highlights from the Copim Open Book Futures project, building non-commercial infrastructure to develop open access book publishing, included:

• Thoth Open Metadata was nominated for the 2025 ALPSP Innovation Award and is set to release a significant upgrade early next year;
• Copim's Accessibility work package released its accessibility guide for open access book publishers, including a section on accessibility for librarians;
• Copim Compass was released, drawing together a comprehensive suite of resources to support open access book publishing;
• Copim is planning a conference on 26-27 February to explore: What's next for community-led open access book publishing? Sign up for free in person or online.

Other highlights:

• Our Co-Director Rupert Gatti wrote 'Beyond "No Fee": Why Diamond Open Access Is Much More Than Just a Business Model' with Pierre Mounier and Johan Rooryck in Current Trends in Open Science: Will Open Science Change the World? (Ledzioni LediPublishing, 2025);
• Our senior editor and outreach coordinator Lucy Barnes wrote 'How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?' with Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman, Ursula Rabar and Niels Stern, published in Katina;
• We published important blog posts on the topics of academic freedom—including a contribution from author Ash Lierman—and open licensing;
• Our series editor Geoffrey Khan has released a case study about publishing the Semitic Languages and Cultures series in open access;
• We have also given various talks this year, on topics including AI in open access publishing and fostering a culture of open access book publishing beyond mandates.

*Image credit: Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash  *

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Open Book Publishers is now on Instagram! Follow us!

If you are too, please follow us there! We'll be sharing information about new books, conversations with authors, and glimpses 'behind the curtain' at the publishing process...

OBP is a 'Top 100 UK social enterprise' for the fifth year in a row!

We are thrilled to announce that we are once again on this year's SE100 list! For more information, and to see the other excellent organisations who have been selected, see this webpage.

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That's all for this month ― and year! We wish you a peaceful holiday and a happy and healthy new year when it arrives.

See you in 2026!

By Tricia de Souza

On December 21, 2012, the world as we know it was meant to change forever. According to the Mayan long-count calendar, the day ushered a new period of history similar to the turn of the 21st century. A Reuters global poll in May 2012, however, showed that 10 percent of people worldwide anxiously awaited the day, believing it marked something more sinister: the end of times, which would be caused by either “the hands of God, a natural disaster or a political event.”

This preoccupation with an impending doomsday is not particular to the twenty-first century, however. Charles Webster’s book A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment chronicles the ventures of Samuel Hartlib, known as “the Great Intelligencer of Europe.” Hartlib lived during the tumultuous decades of the mid-seventeenth century when a growing apocalyptic fervour gripped the masses. As Webster reveals, this broader concern for predicting the end of times also reflected deeper concerns regarding the bleak realities that many were facing during these periods of crisis.

The 17th century saw England grapple with consecutive civil wars between Parliamentarians and Royalists that lasted from 1642 until 1651. In total, it is estimated that upwards of 200,000 people lost their lives as a consequence of these civil wars, be it through direct combat or disease. Among those who died was Charles I, who was accused of treason and was subsequently executed on January 30, 1649, causing the temporary fall of the Stuart line. Fifth Monarchists promoted the millennialist belief that the demise of the head of state would usher in a thousand-year-long reign of Christ.

Religious and political turmoil also impacted Hartlib’s early life. He was born around 1600 to a German-Protestant father who fled various towns in Poland due to mounting persecution against religious minorities during the Counter-Reformation. His father would eventually settle in Elbing, Poland in 1589, with hopes of creating a more stable life among the larger immigrant population of the coastal city. However, these aspirations would also come to a standstill as the plague claimed nearly a third of the city’s population in 1625 and Swedish forces occupied the city a year later until 1635 and then once more from 1655 to 1660.

Following academic opportunity, Hartlib moved to Cambridge in 1625. Beyond occasional trips back to Poland, this move cemented England as his permanent abode. Nevertheless, Hartlib maintained a deep concern for the plight of refugees. He offered help in various forms, be it helping to raise funds for exiled communities or promoting universal education. Even while dealing with financial uncertainties due to inconsistent sponsorships, Hartlib also opened his home to fleeing Protestants.

It is out of this dedication to the Protestant cause that Hartlib, with major contributions from Scottish minister John Dury and tax official Michael Gühler, published one of his most widely circulated texts in February 1651, Clavis apocalyptica—a title that borrowed its name from Joseph Mede’s 1627 study on the eschatological chronology of the Book of Revelations.

In Clavis apocalyptica, Gühler surmised that the world would end in 1655, but instead of apocalyptic figures solely vanquishing the earth, he predicted it would end the strife of the Protestants and that the “oppressed [would] take the possession of their former dignities” (Hartlib 89). While Dury did not pinpoint an exact year unlike Gühler, his preface in the book also related Judgment Day to the dismal condition of Protestants, citing a letter written by Czech theologian John Amos Comenius in which he mentions his son-in-law witnessing only terrors when visiting the Polish cities of Warsaw and Brieg.

Within this 1651 text, the apocalypse unfolds not only as a celestial event. It was intertwined with the earthly dealings of monarchies and their treatment of their subjects, in which Hartlib and his circle were indelibly enmeshed.

A recurring theme within A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib is that the lives of both Hartlib and his confidantes were coloured by financial hardship. Many of Hartlib’s associates migrated to different countries in pursuit of better financial opportunity outside of England. Others were not so fortunate. Hartlib describes how Gabriel Plattes, an English writer of agriculture, fell “downe dead in the street for want of food.” By the time of his own death in 1662, Hartlib wrote extensive letters regarding his worsening state of health and financial distress—about which his friends could only send messages of sympathy.

Thus, while Webster’s book provides an overview of the larger, fiery debates regarding millennialist movements, the Counter-Reformation and political shifts in Europe, A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib also sheds a critical light on the “personal apocalypses” that Hartlib contended with as he transformed from an aspiring student with little professional training to a prominent European interlocutor.

Within Webster’s chapters, Hartlib’s accomplishments become testaments to the enduring value of education, religious freedom and community-building. While Hartlib’s tenacity is certainly a strong point, it was born out of difficulties that many times he had no means to change. Amidst such turmoil, the ability to predict the end times may have provided a sense of control during these periods. More than that, it instilled a sense of hope that, amidst despair, change was just on the horizon.

Hartlib, however, did not look towards the future in hopes of erasing his world. Instead, his continued commitment to universal betterment even as his own life was near its end reminds readers that imagining a different tomorrow does not preclude committing oneself to a different today.

Nearly four centuries later, this still stands true.

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'A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment' by Charles Webster is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats at the link below.

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By Charles Webster

Particularly because the massive Hartlib archive has been available in digitised form since 2013, it is amazing that Hartlib himself has not been the subject of a modern English language monograph. Acceleration in the pace of Hartlib studies is essentially a characteristic of the last few years, during which the ambitious French study on Hartlib by Stéphane Haffemayr, dating from 2018, is the major item of relevance. My Portrait of Samuel Hartlib is an entirely different construction, but it pursues the same objective of confirming Hartlib as a figure of central importance in the British, European and American history of that revolutionary period.

Hartlib’s achievement was all the more remarkable considering the disadvantages stemming from his status as an obscure immigrant, of only indifferent social or professional status, and soon the sufferer of extreme poverty and ever-escalating ill-health. However, his position as an outsider imported various benefits, among these being his education in Silesia, which was cosmopolitan and diverse. Additional strengths were acquired as a private student in Cambridge, which prepared him for an intimate alignment with the developing Puritan ascendancy. He was therefore well prepared for settlement in London, where he remained from 1628 until his death in 1662.

There he proved his utility as a source of a wide variety of intelligence, ranging from international affairs to economic and technical matters. His services were valued by aspiring politicians, the incipient religious leadership and powerful members of the Puritan nobility. Critical among these was John Pym, who soon emerged as a dominant voice among the Parliamentary political leadership.

A particular asset of Hartlib was his association Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius), the Czech exile, whose visit to England in 1641-2 raised hopes for the wholesale adoption of his revolutionary educational programme. This proved to be impracticable. But Hartlib compensated for this through his participation in the remarkable efflorescence of educational initiatives that characterised the interregnum and Cromwellian protectorate.

This period proved to be the highpoint in Hartlib’s career, when he became universally known and enjoyed cordial relations with the evolving political leadership, including Oliver Cromwell. In recognition of his sworn commitment to public service he was awarded a state pension, although this was never sufficient to support the ever-expanding horizons of his ambitions.

The extent of his influence was increased by his emergence as a major publisher in the general field of reform, especially agriculture, which at that date held the key to economic development. This has led this period in agriculture to be labelled as ‘The age of Hartlib.’ Initiatives of this kind reflected the status of natural leadership that Hartlib attained, particularly among the avant-garde of the younger generation. In this context he generated a variety of schemes for the organisation of advanced research, most of which proved to be impracticable. However, these initiatives generated a taste for active cooperation which expressed itself in the emergence of informal working parties that I call the Hartlibian scientific movement. These, I claim, were something of a precursor to more formal organisations such as the Royal Society.

The importance of these informal agencies should not be underestimated. As economic historians now appreciate, among the enduring achievements of the team led by Hartlib were the first policy statements that are now recognised as the basis for what is now known as the ‘Hartlibian Political Economy’. This was not merely an abstract theoretical framework, but was a spur to economic development and the transformation of foreign policy, aiming at nothing less that Britain’s world dominance.

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Hartlib participated in this revolutionary intellectual reorientation in further respects such as his active involvement in apocalyptic speculation which, during this period, was a spur to many practical issues such as the consolidation of alliances between the Protestant states. But this body of thinking also reflected the sense of Britain’s special place of leadership in world reformation. The nation came to be regarded as the epitome of the Communion of Saints and the locus of the New Jerusalem. It was these themes that were uppermost in their minds, when Hartlib and his friends exchanged the last of their letters before his painful death in March 1662.

'A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment' by Charles Webster is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats at the link below.

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