Open Book Publishers

A collection of 24 posts

Open Book Publishers

15 Years of Open Book Publishers: An Interview with Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti

Open Book Publishers (OBP), founded in 2008, celebrates its 15th year of operation this year. Read now an interview with Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti where they discuss OBP's transformative journey in scholarly publishing.

OBP Newsletter

OBP Spring Newsletter 2021

We have exciting news about upcoming events, new and forthcoming publications, an interview with our developer Ross Higman and information on our open CFPs. There’s lots to explore below, so dive in to find out more about our plans for the months ahead...

Language

The Possibility of Signs

This is the first of a series of blog post on one of our latest titles 'Simplified Signs: A Manual Sign-Communication System for Special Populations'. Read William B. Bonvillian's reflections on the Simplified Signs project.

OBP Newsletter

Get to Know Us: An Interview with Agata Morka

An interview with our new European Co-ordinator for Open Access Books, Agata Morka.

carbon footprint 2020

The Environmental Impact of Open Book Publishers

At Open Book Publishers, we are working to minimise our environmental impact. Find out more in this post.

carbon footprint 2020 Featured

OBP to Shrink our Carbon Footprint in 2020

In 2020, OBP will be taking steps to shrink our carbon footprint, and we will be blogging about our experiences along the way.

Metrics Featured

What We Talk About When We Talk About… Book Usage Data

An easy-to-understand explanation of how we collect our book usage data, and why we have started to present it differently.

bad actors Featured

Open Book Publishers’ statement on Knowledge Unlatched and the Open Research Library

We have grave concerns about the approach and business model of the Open Research Library, and those of its creator Knowledge Unlatched, which we will set out in this post.

Academic Publishing

OBP's responses to the UUK Open Access Monographs project questionnaire

OBP has participated in the data-gathering exercise that is currently being carried out by Fullstopp Gmbh on behalf of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs working group. The questionnaire, which is available online, has been designed to collect information that will inform future OA policy decisions, and in the

Academic Publishing Featured

Why OBP is not participating in KU Open Funding: and why libraries should understand the reasons.

Knowledge Unlatched has recently announced the launch of a new platform to fund Open Access (OA) books. In this post, we explain our concern with this platform and why we won't be participating.

Academic Publishing

A Director Writes: The First Ten Years of OBP

When Alessandra and Rupert invited me to join them in establishing Open Publishers as a Community Interest Company, I was delighted to accept. Having been a senior manager in the British Treasury I had experience of economic and financial matters, and that experience had first been brought to bear in

Academic Publishing

Ten Years of OBP: An Interview with Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti (Part Two)

The next ten years: “We need to show this can be different.” While Gatti and Tosi are fiercely proud of what they have built, they believe the future of OBP lies in enabling the growth of other Open Access publishers. Gatti sees this as the way to achieve significant and

Academic Publishing

Ten Years of OBP: An Interview with Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti (Part One)

Ten years ago today Open Book Publishers [https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/14/1] was born. Non-profit, scholar-led and now the leading UK Open Access publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences, OBP began as a small-scale experiment, a passion project for co-directors Alessandra Tosi and

1600-1850

Expect the Unexpected

Underlying my contributions to Information and Empire is academic work extending back several decades over much of my academic career (with many breaks for other projects). I have had the satisfaction of seeing conclusions based on imperfect evidence confirmed by the work of colleagues (notably Ingrid Maier and Stepan Shamin)

1600-1850

Of Roots and Scrolls

Or, How the Bible, Witchcraft, and Botany Were Brought Together By Bureaucracy In A Completely Everyday Fashion That Was Totally Normal At The Time, No, Really, Stay With Me On This One You Guys. Because I can explain. This is the story of an institution both entirely unique and completely

1600-1850

How do people know things?

“How do people know things?” – the title of this blog post – seems like a simple question, but as our new publication, Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 demonstrates, the answer is complex. The volume focuses on how people knew things in pre-modern Russia, from the

100th Book

One Hundred Books: How Far Have We Come? (Part Three)

Open Technology: The Future of Open Access This is the third and final part of a three-part series of blogs to celebrate the publication of our hundredth book [https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/611]. To read the first part, click here. [https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/one-hundred-books-how-

100th Book

One Hundred Books: How Far Have We Come? (Part Two)

This is part of a three-part series of blogs to celebrate the publication of our hundredth book [https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/611]. To read the first part, click here. [https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/one-hundred-books-how-far-have-we-come-part-one/] To read the final part,

100th Book

One Hundred Books: How Far Have We Come? (Part One)

Open Book Publishers was born in 2008, sparked into life by co-founder and managing editor Alessandra Tosi’s first-hand experience of the frustrations of academic publishing. The thrill of seeing her book in print was dampened by the realisation that, thanks to its exorbitant price and small print

Notes From The Editor

OBP Nominated for Education Award

We are delighted to announce that we are 2017 WISE Awards Finalists [http://bit.ly/2jtNQ4N]! The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) rewards organisations for their innovative and impactful approaches to today’s most urgent education challenges, and we are thrilled to be recognised alongside some very impressive projects.

OBP Customised

Sharing Knowledge Just Got More Personal

OBP is delighted to announce the launch of OBP Customised, a new line of customised editions that lets readers create their own books! We are the first Open Access publisher in the UK to offer such a service – an exciting opportunity for readers to mix, match, and personalise their own

Data

Introducing Some Data to the Open Access Debate: OBP’s Business Model (Part One)

There is quite a lot of discussion about how to finance the costs of publishing monographs in Open Access. While lots of alternative business models have been identified, actual hard data on the publishing costs and revenue associated with academic books are conspicuously absent from the debate (for fairly obvious

Data

Introducing Data to the Open Access Debate: OBP's Business Model (Part Two)

In the first part of this post I identified some of the problems I perceive with the legacy publishing model for academic books, articulated the primary objectives of OBP, and noted that at OBP we have the same number of sales per book and two orders of magnitude more readers

Data

Introducing Data to the Open Access Debate: OBP’s Business Model (Part Three)

Here are our cost and revenue figures. As also reported at the OASPA conference, they are for the 12-month period from 1 September 2014 to 31 August 2015. Being based in the UK, our accounts are actually denominated in British pounds, but to ease international comparison I have reported