UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of The Academic Book of the Future, which is likely to be of interest to UCL Library staff. View it online for free: https://goo.gl/dbLS2N

This dynamic, innovative, evolving and open platform publishes contributions connected to the AHRC/British Library project, The Academic Book of the Future, which has been investigating key aspects of scholarly publishing for the last two years, led by a team of academics from UCL and Kings College London. The platform, which presents the content in the form of a BOOC (Books as Open Online Content), will grow as more content is created, and will allow different ways to explore and share the ideas and discussions.

Authors from all areas of the academic, publishing, bookselling and library communities discuss aspects of scholarly books and their possible futures: for example, the role of the editor, peer review, academic bookshops and libraries, open access, digital publishing and technology. The content – in a range of peer-reviewed formats including videos, blogs, chapters and reports – presents a fascinating variety of insights into the constantly evolving contexts of the academic book and will be of interest to anyone working in the HE sector and the publishing industry, and, indeed, to anyone interested in how ideas are disseminated to a wider general audience.

Content now available includes:

• Introduction to Academic Book of the Future
  Samantha J. Rayner
• Open Access Book Publishing and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Theoretical Approach to a Description of the slow scalability of Open Access Book Publishing
  Marcel Knöchelmann
• The Academic Book of the Future and Its Readers: Issues and Opportunities of Onscreen Reading
  Silvia Pirola
• Academic Book Discovery, Evaluation and Access: A Report
  Anna Faherty
• The Academic Book in the South: Conference Report
  Stephanie Kitchen
• The (Open) Academic Book of the Future
  Sarah Lippincott
• American Mathematical Society: Publishing Maths in the USA
  Robert Harrington
• What is the Point of the Academic Book? Part One
  Rebecca Lyons
• What is the Point of the Academic Book? Part Two
  Mari Shullaw
• What is the Future for the Academic Book?
  Sussex Research Hive
• The Future of the Academic Book in the USA
  Amy Brand, Anne Brackenbury, Robert Harington, Sarah Lippincott and moderated by Sheila Bond
• My Acts of Reading
  Andrew Prescott
• Students and the Digital Edition: A Polemic
  Stephen Gregg
• Open Access and Academic Publishing
  Ian Lovecy
• Open Access: A Personal Take
  Alastair Horne
• Towards an Ethics of Circulation: A Manifesto in Tweets
  Haidy Geismar
• Creative Writing Theses: Discoverability and Open Access
  Rebecca Lyons
• What is the Future for the Academic Book? BSECS 2016 Storify
• Github notes on What is the Future for the Academic Book?
  James Baker
• The Academic Book in the South (Storify)
• What is the Point of the Academic Book? BSECS Panel Storify
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations
  Paul Moore
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations
  Catherine Grant
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations
  Karen Savage
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations
  Mikey Murray
• Publishers Address the Academic Book of the Future
  Amy Brand, Anne Brackenbury, Robert Harington, Sarah Lippincott and moderated by Sheila Bond
• What is the Future for the Academic Book? – Video recording of a panel
  Caroline Basset, Kiren Shoman, Martin Eve
• Academic Publishing in the South: The Ghanaian Experience
  Akoss Ofori-Mensah
• New Directions, New Models 
  Abhijit Gupta and Padmini Ray Murray
• Panel Discussion: Academic Authorship and Knowledge Production
  Stephanie Kitchen, Insa Nolte & Padmini Ray Murray
• Panel Discussion: The Role of Libraries and Archives
  Gillian Evison, Francis Gotto & James Lowry
• Final Panel Discussion & Concluding Comments
  Ola Uduku
• Panel: The Role of Libraries and Archives
  Nureldin Satti
• The Academic Book of the Future Project Film
• Panel: Academic Authorship and Knowledge Production
  Sari Hanafi

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

In June, I took part in the first meeting of all the members of a European consortium developing pan-European infrastructure and services for open access in the social sciences and humanities, led by the French organisation Open Edition. Partners from 22 organisations in 10 countries (Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the UK) gathered to discuss the progress of the project to date and next steps in development. UCL Press joined in March 2017 as one of eight core members of the consortium.

OPERAS already has two projects underway that have received significant funding from Horizon 2020. The first of these is OPERAS-D, a design study to address the long-term requirements for governance models, structures and scientific and technical concepts for future services that the infrastructure will provide. The second is HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), which focuses on the monograph as a significant mode of scholarly communication, and tackles the main obstacles preventing the full integration of publishing platforms supporting open access monographs. It will do this by improving five existing open access books platforms, enhancing their technical capacities and services, ensuring their interoperability and embedding them fully into the European Open Science Cloud.

OPERAS’ final goal is to clarify the landscape of Open Access book for libraries and funders through a certification service (DOAB – Directory of Open Access Books); to improve the accessibility and dissemination of research outputs in SSH through a single discovery service; and to increase the impact of multidisciplinary research on societal challenges through a single ‘research for society’ service. It will also provide communication and advocacy, training, R&D, development of business models, standardization of technologies, and adoption of best practices for open access.

OPERAS is now planning its next stages of development – its governance, business model, legal status, and operational development over the coming years, and UCL Press is looking forward to being more involved in the next stages. At the meeting its new work packages were launched, and UCL Press will be involved in the Business Models and Communications work packages. This highly ambitious project aims to address many of the challenges that currently hamper open access from becoming the standard practice for scholarly communication. By pooling resources and expertise from across Europe, OPERAS is developing a significant step forward on the path towards open access for all.

Find out more:

• http://operas.hypotheses.org/aboutoperas
• https://www.openedition.org/?lang=en

We are delighted to announce the publication of 3 new open access books from UCL Press.

New Books (July)

• A Conversation about Healthy Eating
• Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America
• The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations: A Bilingual Edition and Commentary (17th July)

Please don’t hesitate to contact the UCL Press team with any questions or queries about UCL press or any of our titles.

We are delighted to announce the publication of 9 new open access books and 5 open access journal issues from UCL Press. Additionally, we are also delighted to provide information about a brand new student journal, Interscript, hosted on UCL’s student publishing platform.

New Books (April-June)

• A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education (June 7)
• Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (June 7)
• Memorandoms by James Martin (June 7)
• The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 1) (June 7)
• The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 2)  (June 7)
• The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 3) (June 7)
• The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 4)  (June 7)
• The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 5)  (June 7)
• Fabricate 2017 (21 April)

New Journals (April-June)

• Europe and the World: A Law Review (issue 1, vol. 1 launches on 19th June)
• Jewish Historical Studies (vol 48)
• The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (issue 1, vol. 2016)
• Architecture_MPS (issue 5, vol. 11 / issue 4, vol. 11)

Student Journals Hosted by UCL Press (April-June)

• Interscript: UCL Journal of Publishing (vol 1, issue 1). This journal is run by students of the MA publishing course, and hosted on UCL’s OJS platform. The students have also published an online magazine.

Please don’t hesitate to contact the UCL Press team with any questions or queries about UCL press or any of our titles.

We are delighted to share the news that UCL Press will be hosting the second  University Press Redux Conference in February 2018. We will be the second Press to take up the programming challenge. The conference was launched and hosted by Liverpool University Press in 2016, and has become a biennial event.  From 2018 onwards,  the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) will be supporting the organisation of this biennnial event from now on to build on its success.

Find out more about the 2018 conference at https://www.alpsp.org/UPRedux.

The 2018 Conference will take place over two full days at The British Library Conference Centre, London on Tuesday 13 and Wednesday 14 February 2018. Registration will open Autumn 2017. Confirmed speakers so far include:

• Peter Berkery, Executive Director, Association of American University Presses
• Amy Brand, Director, MIT Press
• Richard Charkin, Executive Director, Bloomsbury Publishing
• Max Landry, Chief Executive, The Conversation, UK
• Frank Smith, Director, Books at JSTOR
• Jan-Peter Wissink, Managing Director, Amsterdam University Press
• Timothy Wright, Chief Executive, Edinburgh University Press

Find out more at https://www.alpsp.org/UPRedux.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

On 22^nd March I had the great pleasure of meeting a delegation of 15 Chinese publishers from the largest publisher in China, the China Publishing Group, and presented a two-hour session to them on academic publishing in the UK and, more specifically, the university-based open access publishing model forged by UCL Press.

CPG, which was ranked no.14 in the 2014 Top 50 Global Publishing Groups, has been in the Top 30 of Chinese Cultural Enterprises for six consecutive years, and owns 40 individual publishing companies and imprints which produce over 10,000 titles per year. Importantly, it concludes licensing agreements with overseas publishers for over 1,000 books and journals per year, and comprises China’s biggest publications import and export enterprise, importing and exporting over 200,000 titles every year. CPG also owns 28 overseas publishing houses and bookshops.

The publishers I met reflected the wide range of publishing that takes place in the CPG family – scholarly, children’s, poetry, encyclopedias, and art and architecture to name just a few. The delegates were in England as part of a three-week training programme during which they met publishers, wholesalers, PR agencies and others in the publishing industry, to gain greater insights into the possibilities for doing business with publishers in the UK, and their trip also included attendance at the London Book Fair, who had organized their training programme.

I was joined during the session by one of UCL Press’s authors, Dr Gabriel Moshenska, Senior Lecturer in the UCL Institute of Archaeology, whose textbook, Key Concepts in Public Archaeology, has just been published by UCL Press. Gabe explained from an author’s point of view why open access publishing is so important i.e. the ability to communicate his ideas to a wide global readership, and why open access textbooks in particular are increasingly important for supporting the student experience and for making UCL teaching resources available globally, thereby raising the profile of UCL teaching and research. We demonstrated UCL Press’s online publishing platform, which features scholarly functionalities such as highlighting, making notes, saving personalised copies of books, sharing and citation. The CPG publisher for fine art books was particularly interested in the subject of public archaeology, a field that was pioneered at UCL and has been taught here for twenty years. There is growing international interest in public archaeology in countries such as the US, Australia, Italy, Sweden and China. We were able to tell the delegates about UCL’s global standing, particularly in subjects such as archaeology, architecture and education.

The publishers asked a range of perceptive questions about the Press’s model, for example, could a particularly successful OA book raise an author’s profile to the extent that they decide to publish elsewhere with a commercial publisher, and how the endeavour is financed.

In China, open access does exist for journals but not yet for books. Print books are in any case sold at a very low price, between £2.50 and £3.50 typically, and, according to one of the publishers who works for CPG’s academic imprint, scholarly monographs can sell in relatively large numbers ie 4000-5000 copies, so the scholarly publishing model in China does not suffer from the same degree of problems as the Western one. One particular barrier in China to open access for monographs is a culture in which free things are not trusted to be of good quality. And as in the UK and US, publisher brand prestige is hugely important.

In order for UCL Press to make its books available in China in Chinese, it will need to arrange licensing deals between a Chinese publisher and the author, for the Chinese publisher to translate and sell the work in China, which is the usual way books are licensed to foreign-language publishers. UCL Press has had expressions of interest in some of its books from Chinese publishers and as our publishing programme continues to expand, this interest is likely to grow. While we would ideally like our books to be published open access around the world, we recognize that the OA model for books is not yet widely enough developed and therefore we accept that a commercial model for making the books available in other languages can be the only available route. This is with the notable exception of books in our social media series, Why We Post, which the WWP project has undertaken to translate into all eight languages of the project. These will be published by UCL Press as open access, with the exception perhaps of the two Chinese titles, Social Media in Industrial China and Social Media in Rural China, for which there is strong interest from Chinese publishers who are unlikely to agree to publication of a simultaneous OA Chinese version.

UCL Press will of course always make the English language version of our books available as open access to a global audience, something the publishers from CPG did not think would be a barrier to Chinese publication. All in all, it was a fascinating couple of hours exchanging ideas and information about different publishing models. The Beijing Book Fair beckons!

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

The London Book Fair is one of the highlights of the year for many publishers from all over the world, and is one of two key annual publisher trade fairs, along with the Frankfurt Book Fair held in October every year. This year, there were 1,577 exhibitors from 57 countries, showing their books and services and meeting with their business partners. For many publishers at the Fair, selling rights to publishers in other countries is the main purpose. UCL Press had a stand this year on the IPG (Independent Publishers’ Guild) collective stand, and all UCL Press staff spent two or three days at the Fair, having meetings and attending seminars.

Altogether we had over 40 meetings over the three days, Lara took part in two panel sessions in The Faculty area (one on the Academic Book of the Future project, and one with Ingenta and Wiley on how to reach readers in a world of overwhelming content), and Press staff attended several seminars relevant to their roles. Our meetings were with existing partners and suppliers, freelance editors and designers, our counterparts at other university presses, as well as potential new suppliers and partners. We also had chance meetings with many others who saw our stand and came to talk to us – booksellers, sales representatives, editors etc. Even before the Fair, a number of meetings had already taken place with people who were in town for the Fair – Jaimee (UCL Press Managing Editor) met up with the Managing Editors and Production Managers of other university presses, a regular twice-yearly meet up for sharing knowledge, and Lara met up with the Association of American University Presses Director who are helping the Press with a number of interesting projects.

At such a critical point in UCL Press’s development, when we are in the process of appointing a North American distributor, developing a new website, expanding to 50 books a year, planning a major conference for university presses in 2018 (University Press Redux 2018), participating in a European OA infrastructure project (OPERAS), developing publishing services for other institutions and reviewing journal publishing models, the Fair was the perfect opportunity to advance all these projects with key people and potential new partners in one intensive block. It also enhances visibility for the Press via the stand, appearances on discussion panels, and articles and interviews by staff links.

We were also very proud to see the UCL Publishing Studies MA students launching the magazine element of their new student journal, Interscript, which is hosted on UCL Press’s OA student journal platform. With plenty of social media promotion, publicity at the Fair and a launch at the Association of Publishing Educators’ stand, it has got off to a very promising start. It’s inspiring to see the publishers of the future in action.

Altogether, the Fair provides a very exciting and collegial environment. As ever after the Fair, I have come away feeling that I have learnt a great deal, forged new relationships and been inspired by the sheer creativity and commitment of my fellow publishers.

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From the Enlightenment to the first Apple Mac, universities have been the driving force that change the world. Now a new publication from UCL Press explores the role of philanthropy in a rapidly changing higher education environment.

The publication brings to a wider audience the keynote speech given by investor and philanthropist Dr Gerald Chan, who spoke at UCL’s Insiders Day in July 2016 – a preview for close friends and supporters of the new Campaign for UCL which launched publicly in September 2016. Read about the launch here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign/campaign-news/campaign-launch

Highlighting the vital need for philanthropic public-private partnerships, Dr Chan argues that the independence of universities is crucial for maintaining their dual role as engines of the economy and places of curiosity driven research. He concludes: “This is not a budgetary struggle, it is a struggle for the very soul of the university.”

Read the full publication here – https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/the-research-university-in-todays-society/

Payng tribute to Dr Chan in the publication’s foreword, UCL’s President & Provost Professor Michael Arthur says: “We could not have asked for a clearer and more cogent overview of the unique, far-reaching value of philanthropy.

“It is doing something completely different. It enables great researchers to be daring and disruptive, to follow a hunch, to end in a place completely different from the one they expected, to pursue the projects that, for a variety of reasons, public funding cannot support.

“It is this work that produces outcomes that shake society.”

This post originally appeared at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign/campaign-news/Gerald-Chan-philanthropy-and-universities 

UCL Press was thrilled to win the UCL Brand Ambassador award at the UCL professional services awards yesterday. The award was made for the global reach UCL Press’s books and journals have achieved, with download figures now close to 200,000 in over 200 countries since its launch in June 2015.

When UCL Press launched, it was the first university press to set up from scratch with an Open Access model. As such, it was a brave step, and since such a venture had never been attempted before in the UK, it was hard to predict the outcome. The idea for the Press was that of Dr Paul Ayris, Pro Vice Provost, UCL Library Services, a leader in OA advocacy for many years, and the Press was the flagship addition to strong OA services and policies already established at UCL.

From the outset, the reaction at UCL to the Press has been unfailingly positive: authors have submitted proposals in the hundreds, many of them already committed Open Access advocates with few other OA options for publishing their monographs. For those early adopters, and for the Senior Management team at UCL who supported the setting up of the Press, their belief is now paying dividends, as research published by UCL Press reaches a huge global audience. Many of those reading UCL Press’s books would not be able to access a print version, either because they would be unaffordable to individuals or to local universities, or simply because print book distribution to many countries around the world is severely limited or indeed non-existent.

UCL is committed to being a force for good and enlightenment in the world, and ensuring that the products of its research are made as widely available as possible helps to support that commitment. UCL Press is excited to be contributing to the institution’s global presence, and proud that its books and authors are acting as UCL Brand Ambassadors worldwide.

I would personally like to thank the whole UCL Press team, our wonderful authors, David Price, Paul Ayris and Martin Moyle for their unfailing support and encouragement, our colleagues in Library Services, and our colleagues around UCL who support us – all of them make this happen.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

UCL Press and Academic Book of the Future are delighted to invite you to an event at the British Library to celebrate the publication of the Academic Book of the Future BOOC during Academic Book week. To register, please visit: http://bit.ly/2jFfLvm

UCL Press launched in June 2015, and it makes all its scholarly books and journals available freely online in open access form, as well as in print. Since it launched, it has published 30 books and 5 journals and its books and journals have reached more than 180,000 readers in over 190 countries around the world. As well as traditional monographs, UCL Press publishes innovative digital research on a browser-based platform, featuring articles and chapters of different lengths, different formats (blog, video, audio), and which are added over time – and so the BOOC was born (Books as Open Online Content). The first book in this format features the research outputs from the Academic Book of the Future project, an AHRC/British Library funded project led by researchers at UCL and Kings College London.

The UCL Press team will be available to:

• Demonstrate BOOC live:

• Answer questions about its open access model – or anything else about its publishing activity

• Show its books

• Present its new publishing services model for other institutions who wish to set up their own

• Presentation

A presentation about UCL Press will take place at 11 – 11.15, followed by a Q&A session.

To register, please visit: http://bit.ly/2jFfLvm