Open Book Publishers - Spring Newsletter - May 2022
Welcome to our Spring Newsletter!
We have updates from COPIM and the OABN, information about our new and forthcoming publications, calls for proposals, new blogs and videos, latest reviews and more...
Authors Survey's is still open!
We would like to ask for your feedback on the publishing process with us. We would also like to collect demographic data about our authors, editors, and contributors to help us form a better picture of the communities we interact with – and the gaps in representation that need addressing. This data will remain private and the identities of those individuals who agree to participate will not be disclosed under any circumstance. If you are one of our authors, editors, or contributors please, click here to access the survey.
We would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that if you are an author or an editor of any of our titles you can access the OBP Author Reports page to find out more about readership and sales information for your book. If you are unable to log in, or have any question please contact our Marketing and Library Relations Officer Laura Rodriguez here.
EIFL Partnership
OBP is working with EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) to provide three years' free membership of the OPB Library Membership Programme to libraries that are members of library consortia in EIFL partner countries, including Botswana, Cambodia, Kosovo and many more.
As part of this partnership, 20 Ukranian institutional libraries receive free access to all our resources and can download and keep our books in their repository permanently.
We would like to invite our readers to read Libraries on the front line of war, a blog post by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, on the current situation at libraries and learning institutions in the area.
Access the latest COPIM reports:
* Introducing the Open Book Collective by Judith Fathallah: shorturl.at/afqI5
* Introducing COPIM's new website by Simon Bowie: shorturl.at/gwDF2
* Library perspective: balancing investments and sustainability in Open Access by Tom Grady, Opening the Future, and WP3: shorturl.at/szDJS
* University of California signs up to Opening the Future programme by Tom Grady, WP3, and Opening the Future: shorturl.at/bqBLR
* New COPIM Report on Community Governance of Open Infrastructures by Janneke Adema: shorturl.at/isuBU
Open Access Books Network becomes an OPERAS Special Interest Group
The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is pleased to share that it has become an OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG), and as such it is now formally supported by OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area.
Find more information about the OABN, get involved, or access past blogs, interviews, and resources at https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/
New Open Access Publications
These past months we have released 8 new titles in the fields of development studies, history, literature, music, and anthropology. As always, these titles are freely available to read and download at www.openbookpublishers.com.
You can access these titles at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/2/1
Forthcoming Open Access Publications
In the next months, we will see the publication of new exciting Open Access titles in the fields of history, Hellenic studies, medieval literature, psychology, migration studies and more!
Visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/7/1to access our full list of forthcoming titles.
Call for Reviewers!
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association is currently looking for reviewers for our title What is Authorial Philology? by Paola Italia, Giulia Raboni et al.
Interested in reviewing this title? Contact our Marketing and Library Relations Officer, Laura Rodriguez, at laura@openbookpublishers.com
New Blogs
* Open Education Resources by Daniel Rueda Garrido: http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0192
* Open-access: Our Common Weapon in the Struggle Against Cartelism by Thea Potter: http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0194
* On Open Access by Philip Graham: http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0195
* Some Meanings Embedded in a Book Cover by John Black: http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0196
* A Paean to the Much-maligned Cover Song by P.D. Magnus: http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0197
New Videos
* Book Trailer - 'A Common Good Approach to Development: Collective Dynamics of Development Processes': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYG8CMhdSto
* Learning, Marginalization, and Improving Education in Low-Income Countries - Dr. Daniel Wagner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijbtx6FCOMw
New Video Series
Documentary Making for Digital Humanists Course
In this open-access course from Coventry University lecturer's Darren R. Reid and Brett Sanders, you will be taken through each step in the process of creating a documentary. From concept, buying and setting up your first camera, to recording sound, interview techniques, structure, and editing.
You can access all lessons at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m02woMqm_SM
Call for Proposals
Global Communications
Global Communications is a new book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.
Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.
The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.
The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.
Applied Theatre Praxis This Series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.
Digital Humanities
Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series.
Please do not hesitate to contact us Dr Alessandra Tosi at a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.
Latest Reviews
On the Literature and Thought of the German Classical Era: Collected Essays
by Hugh Barr Nisbet
Das vorliegende Buch ist das wissenschaftliche Vermächtnis von Hugh Barr Nisbet (1940–2021), Emeritus des Sidney Sussex College und Nestor der britischen Aufklärungsfor-schung. Nisbet schloss die Arbeit an diesem Band im Dezember 2020 ab, wenige Wochen vor seinem Tod am 6. Februar 2021. Seine Absicht war es, so der Verfasser und zugleich Herausgeber in seinem konzisen Vorwort, einige der zentralen Probleme und Ideenbe-wegungen des Klassischen Zeitalters der deutschen Literatur und Kultur zu konstellieren. Die von ihm für diesen Zweck aus einem reichen Fundus ausgewählten Studien haben daher trotz ihrer jeweils konkreten Denkanlässe Anspruch auf überzeitliche Bedeutung – sie sind in den Jahren nach ihrer Erstpublikation nicht durch weitere Forschungen ‚gelöst‘ oder ‚überholt‘ worden: „I have selected them", so Nisbet, „as the most important items in connection with problems presented by the major thinkers and writers working at that time" (S. vii). Entsprechend groß ist die thematische Vielfalt der Beiträge. Sie verhandeln philosophische, ästhetische, theologische, religiöse und natürlich literatur-, rezeptions-, wis-senschafts- und ideengeschichtliche Fragen und widmen sich Autoren wie Winckelmann, Kant, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel und anderen. Als britischen Philologen inte-ressieren Nisbet dabei naturgemäß auch Fragen des Kulturtransfers und der Kanonisierung [...] Damit steht der Lektüre der hier angezeigten Studien, die alle an der Literatur der Aufklärung und der klassisch-romantischen Wende um 1800 Interessierten reizen dürfte, nichts mehr im Wege.
— Cord-Friedrich Berghahn (Braunschweig), Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 71.4 (2021).
Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene
by Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier and Geoffrey Rockwell (eds)
Eighteen papers consider the responsibility that educators and researchers have to research sustainably, exploring how institutional practices can be reflected on and adjusted to right their relationship to the environment.
—Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 59, No. 4.
The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod"
by William F. Halloran
The three volumes of William Sharp’s letters are "meticulously and fully annotated, handsomely produced and illustrated. For each "Chapter” of letters (delineated by years or parts of years), Halloran writes a biographical essay, drawing on the letters and their notes and the memoir of Sharp by his wife, to write in effect a new and compelling, if narrowly sourced, biography of Sharp. Halloran includes biographical readings of works by Sharp and Macleod and the narratives move along smartly and lucidly, helping to give the letters their context and to flesh out Sharp and his times. Any student of late Victorian England will benefit from immersion in Sharp’s life and letters.
—Terry L. Meyers, The College of William and Mary, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2022.
by Robin Wahlsten Böckerman
This is a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Ovidian reception, which is well worth the modest price of the print edition.
—Peter Knox, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2022.03.09.
From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture
by Roger Paulin
This is literary criticism and historical insight in the very best tradition: readable, accessible, transparently intelligent, connected, and enlightening. By joining the earlier literary historian Friedrich Gundolf with Goethe in the title, Paulin brings together two centuries of 'Geistesgeschichte', intellectual history at its finest. Bibliography and index are excellent; knowledge of German will be most helpful.
— S. Gittleman, emeritus, Tufts University, CHOICE Connect, May 2022, Vol. 59, No. 9.
A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900
by Andrew Hobbs
Hobbs is persuasive in the case he makes for the aggregate influence of the local newspaper, their ability to inform "vibrant, argumentative” political participation at a local and national level and their role in creating a sense of place and local identity [...] The utility of Hobbs’s work is the way in which his forensic analysis locates titles in their wider cultural context and so begins to demand a broader understanding of the role of local newspapers in communities beyond simpler conveyer of information.
—Rachel Matthews, Journal of Liberal History, 113, Winter 2021-22