We are delighted to present a brand new video celebrating the work of UCL Press to celebrate the Press’ 10 millionth open access download. Join our CEO, Dr Paul Ayris, and a variety of our authors to find out what it’s like to publish with us.

UCL Press, the UK’s first fully Open Access University Press, has announced that its open access books and journals have been downloaded more than ten million times around the world.

UCL Press’s pioneering publishing programme spans many of the major academic disciplines, from history to philosophy and the sciences to anthropology. The Press has published 339 books that have been downloaded more than 8.7 million times, whilst its 14 journals have attracted more than 2.6 million downloads.

Its publications – which feature monographs, edited collections, academic journals and textbooks – have reached readers in 242 countries and territories worldwide, providing access to vital academic research to readers in the Global South and beyond.

The ten millionth download was the journal article A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations by Mark A. Maslin, John Lang and Fiona Harvey, which appeared in the pioneering open science journal UCL Open: Environment.

The most popular title in the UCL Press list continues to be How the World Changed Social Media by UCL Professor of Anthropology Daniel Miller and a collective of eight other global anthropologists. The first book in the hugely popular 11-book Why We Post series, it has been downloaded an astonishing 828,129 times since it was published by UCL Press in early 2016, and it  has been translated into a variety of languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Portuguese and Italian.

Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost at UCL LCCOS (Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science), commented: ‘Started in 2015, UCL Press continues to get better and better. 10,000,000 downloads and consultations underline the transformative effect that Open Access can have, particularly in the OA monograph space. UCL is proud to be developing a sustainable model for institutional OA publishing in Europe.’

Lara Speicher, Head of Publishing at UCL Press, said: ‘It is an immense achievement to have achieved 10 million downloads for UCL Press’s publications and it is thanks to the combined contributions of our incredibly talented and forward-thinking authors who have embraced the OA model, the original vision of senior leaders at UCL to start the Press in the first place and to provide ongoing support and encouragement, and last but not least, the dedication, skill and commitment of the UCL Press team who work hard behind the scenes every day to bring UCL Press’s outputs to the world.’

Explore UCL Press downloads here.

We are delighted to announce that UCL Press books have been downloaded more than 6 million times, just 8 months after celebrating the milestone of 5 million downloads.

Since launching in 2015, we’ve published more than 240 academic books – including monographs, edited collections and textbooks. Downloads have taken place in 246 countries and territories across the world, reaching readers in countries as far afield as Afghanistan and North Korea! You can see the full details of exactly what has been downloaded where here.

Selected highlights

• Our 6 millionth download was Cash Flow: The businesses of menstruation by Camilla Mørk Røstvik, which tells the riveting story of commerce and menstruation from the twentieth century to today.
• The most popular title on our list continues to be How the World Changed Social Media by Professor of Anthropology Daniel Miller and a collective of eight other esteemed global anthropologists. The English-language edition has been downloaded more than 650,000 times since it was published in March 2016 and has been translated into four languages.

Join the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship, UCL Press and UCL library Services in a policy briefing about the new UKRI open access policy.

Date: 26th October 2021
Time: 2-3pm
Register: https://ucl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TG1jEr6DSfOKIQQFE3emFw

The new UKRI open access policy announced in August 2020 affects academics publishing work that acknowledges UK Research Council funding. The policy requires open access on publication under the CC BY licence (or, exceptionally, CC BY-ND) for articles and conference papers submitted on or after 1 April 2022. It also requires open access no later than 12 months after publication for monographs, book chapters and edited collections resulting from a grant from one of the UK Research Councils, published on or after 1 January 2024. The UKRI policy will inform the open access policy for the next REF.

In this first UCL briefing session on the UKRI policy, Catherine Sharp (Head of Open Access Services) will set out the key policy points and compliant routes to publishing in journal articles and conference papers. Lara Speicher (Head of Publishing, UCL Press) will explore the details of the new UKRI monograph requirements, and their implications for authors. Professor Margot Finn (UCL History and immediate past President of the Royal Historical Society) will also join the session to discuss these changes and the implications for authors of monographs in the humanities and social sciences in particular.

Given the importance of the UKRI policy in shaping UK open access requirements, all researchers who publish are encouraged to attend a briefing on the UKRI policy, and to bring questions from their own disciplines.

Please register online.

Join UCL Press during open access week to find out more about their new open access textbook programme and how UCL academics can get involved.

Date: Wednesday October 27th
Time: 2pm
Sign up: https://ucl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SvPKEH_JTv2ziahZTCMmEA

The debate over access and affordability of eTextbooks is high on the agenda for many institutional libraries and publishers and many are calling for an open access solution.
In response, UCL Press is currently developing a new programme of open access textbooks, for undergraduate and postgraduate courses and modules, across disciplines. The new textbook programme will be the first OA textbook list in the UK and builds on the success of the Press’s publishing output and the significant increase in requirements for digital resources, in a changing teaching and learning environment. The programme offers the Press an opportunity to showcase and promote teaching excellence across a broad range of fields and contribute to the open culture UCL is continuing to build.
In this webinar we will discuss in more depth, why and how UCL Press are creating their open access programme and the opportunities, practicalities, and benefits of committing to, publishing and disseminating home-grown textbooks.

We will also focus on other initiatives and projects from UCL and from around the world to provide a forum for lively discussion about open access textbooks and education resources more broadly.

We encourage you to join us to hearing more about this programme and other OA initiatives.

Sign up: https://ucl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SvPKEH_JTv2ziahZTCMmEA

We are delighted to announce that UCL Press books have now been downloaded more than 5 million times. You can see the full details here.

Since launching in 2015, we’ve published more than 200 academic books – including monographs, edited collections and textbooks. Downloads have taken place in 245 countries and territories across the world, reaching readers in countries as far afield as Afghanistan and North Korea!

To celebrate, we’ve produced a video- enjoy!

We are delighted that The Global Smartphone: Beyond a youth technology (published on May 6th 2021) has hit the headlines across the world, with coverage in newspapers including The Sunday Times, The Guardian and Daily Mail.

Coverage in the UK and Ireland has included stories by The Scottish Herald, Reuters, The Irish Times, RTE, Newstalk, and an interview with lead author Prof Daniel Miller (UCL Anthropology) on Sky News this morning. Publications in Portugal (here, here, here and here), Germany, Brazil. Greece  (and here), Slovakia, Romania, Russia, Malaysia, Australia, Albania, Egypt, Russia, Italy, Israel, Czechia and France have also reported on the book’s findings.

The book documents the work of a team of 11 anthropologists who spent 16 months documenting smartphone use in nine countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, with a particular focus on older adults. The team was led by Professor Daniel Miller, whose previous UCL Press series on global social media usage, Why We Post, saw more than a million downloads of the open access books that detailed the findings.

The Global Smartphone: Beyond a youth technology is written by Professor Daniel Miller (UCL Anthropology), Laila Abed Rabho, Patrick Awondo, Maya de Vries, Marília Duque, Pauline Garvey, Laura Haapio-Kirk, Charlotte Hawkins, Alfonso Otaegui, Shireen Walton, and Xinyuan Wang. It is part of the Ageing with Smartphones series, which also includes Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland and Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy.

Posted on behalf of Ian Caswell, UCL Press Journals Manager

UCL Press has launched its new open access megajournal ‘UCL Open’ and will start accepting academic research submissions from today (January 31, 2019).

It is the first university megajournal providing an open access and transparent end to end publishing model, enabling research to be accessible to everyone.

It is being piloted with UCL Open: Environment which focuses on environment-related research and will include contributions from life and earth sciences, as well as medical, physical, population, engineering, and social sciences. The model is expected to be developed and rolled out across a broad range of multidisciplinary research subjects.

Dr Paul Ayris, CEO of UCL Press and Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services), said: “UCL believes that the future of academic and scholarly pursuit is best served by an open science agenda and fully open access publishing because knowledge should be accessible to all, regardless of location or financial means.

“By establishing UCL Press and bringing the publication and dissemination of knowledge back into the academy, UCL will stimulate disruptive thinking and challenge prevailing scholarly publishing models across and beyond the university itself. We want to transform the way new knowledge is shared openly and without barriers.”

UCL first announced that it would be launching a new open access megajournal in January 2018, signalling its continued commitment through UCL Press to providing academics and students with ground-breaking research free of charge in a move that challenges traditional commercial publishing models.

Powered by the ScienceOpen discovery and publication platform, the megajournal aims to showcase radical and critical thinking applied to real world problems that benefit humanity.

The megajournal will champion the open science/scholarship agenda by openly and transparently reviewing and publishing articles that generate new knowledge, ideas and new ways of thinking.

Articles will be judged on the merit and scientific validity (sound science/scholarship) of the work. The journal is inviting submissions from any grade of researcher at and beyond UCL, at all career stages, including early career researchers, professionals, and mid to late career scholars. Editors are welcoming research from all parts of the globe that particularly focus on inter- and multi-disciplinary research.

Professor David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research), said: “UCL seeks to transform how knowledge is shared and applied to humanity’s problems. Only by sharing academic research as openly and widely as possible – with, for example, researchers, educators, students, policymakers, partners and members of the public – can its benefits to humanity be maximised. The traditional scholarly publication system is not fit for, nor does it intend to serve, this purpose.

“UCL Open is a further innovative step towards delivering our ambitions, building on UCL Press’s leading accomplishments in open access. Operating dually as an e-journal with a linked preprint server, accepted papers will first appear as open access preprints, then undergo Open Peer Review before the final article is published in the e-journal. In this way, the entire publishing process will be accessible, transparent, accountable, and faster.”

Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen, said: “Working with UCL Press to further develop the concept of the ‘megajournal’ within the context of an interactive discovery environment has been enriching for all. Drawing on the ScienceOpen infrastructure for preprints, open peer review and community curation, UCL Press is creating new ways to for scholars to interact with research results and rethinking the current publishing paradigm.”

Preprints are defined as scholarly articles that precede publication in a peer-reviewed journal. They speed the delivery and accessibility of academic research work and lead to faster reuse and collaboration by the research community.

UCL Open: Environment is now open and accepting new submissions. To read more about the megajournal, how it works and how to submit, as well as all its peer review and editorial policies, please visit ucl.scienceopen.com.

We are delighted to announce that UCL Press has been accepted as regular members of the Association of University Presses (AUP),  joining more than 140 other university presses worldwide.

Formally established in 1937 as the Association of American University Presses, AUPresses is a community of publishing professionals and institutions committed to the highest calibre of research-based scholarship. AUPresses advocates for the fundamental role of scholarly publishing in achieving academic excellence and in cultivating and disseminating knowledge.

For more information on the work of AUPresses, visit http://www.aupresses.org.

Following the announcement by DCU of the launch of its open access university press (DCU news), the first open access university press in Ireland, UCL Press is delighted to announce that it will be providing publishing services to support DCU Press.

UCL Press started its consultancy and publishing services in late 2017 and has already provided consultancy to UTS Press (University of Technology Sydney), Helsinki University Press, TU Delft, Radboud University and DCU. DCU will be its first publishing services partner.

As a relatively new open access university press, UCL Press is in a unique position to help other universities establish a new press. Setting up an OA university press is a growing trend, and increasing awareness of the benefits of open access publishing, combined with national and funder requirements for open access in both Europe and the UK, have inspired several new open access presses in recent years.

One of the most important determinants of success for a new university press is to attract new authors and build a strong publishing programme, and DCU Press will now focus on establishing its new press and commissioning its first books and journals. UCL Press will work in the background to provide an end-to-end service, including guidance at the setting-up stage and with developing a publishing programme, a publishing platform, full editorial and production services, and open access and print distribution.

Christopher Pressler, University Librarian, DCU said, ‘DCU Press is a unique partnership in Irish universities between DCU’s libraries, research offices and faculties. It is a carefully considered response to change and a progression of the University’s heritage of innovation in open scholarship. Supported by a strong alliance and sound principles, Ireland’s first open access university press will ensure that Dublin City University continues to be at the vanguard of scholarly transformation. DCU and UCL share many of the same aims in terms of how universities must engage with the world and we are pleased to be working in partnership through UCL Press and DCU Press.’

Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice Provost for UCL Library Services and CEO of UCL Press said, ‘We are delighted to work with DCU to establish their new open access university press. DCU is an ambitious university that shares many of the same goals as UCL. UCL Press has demonstrated what it is possible to achieve with an open access press and is delighted to bring its skills and experience to help others such as DCU achieve their goals.’