Posted on behalf of Jaimee Biggins, Managing Editor, UCL Press

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest trade fair for books. It takes place in October every year. UCL Press had a stand at the Fair this year where we could showcase our books, and have meetings with other academic publishers and suppliers. While at the Fair, I attended the 5th International Convention of University Presses. The Convention featured about 100 representatives from more than 22 countries and each year it offers an opportunity to discuss new trends in international academic publishing. It is a great way to network with other university presses and those working in academic publishing and gain an international perspective.

The topic this year was ‘Translation: Unlocking New Worlds of Ideas’. The day focussed mainly on foreign language authors who want to be translated into English. The keynote ‘What factors determine the circulation of scholarly books in translation?’ by Gisèle Sapiro (Director of Research at the CNRS –The French National Center for Scientific Research) set the scene for the discussion. It sparked quite a debate especially around the funding for translation of scholarly works. Scholarly books are costly to translate and do not sell many copies, so there is quite a dependence on subsidies. Other sources of funding are international organisations and private foundations. Also interesting to note is the trend of scholars choosing to write in English so they will be read right away – this is sometimes at the sacrifice of publishing in their national language. There is also a certain pressure by publishers on academics to publish in English to gain access to the widest readership possible.

In the round table discussion there was a presentation of different translation grant programmes, with speakers from organisations in countries such as Canada, Germany, Norway and France all outlining funding programmes that support translation. It was interesting to hear about schemes to support authors by offering grants which cover the cost of translation and also expenses such as book launches and promotional activities. All of the programmes aimed to make academic books more visible through translations. The criteria for this funding varied – for example the Council for the Arts, Canada, base their funding on the impact, merit and feasibility of the project. Unfortunately it is a trend that there are many more applications received than grants available. Astrid Thorn Hillig from the Association of European University Presses said that university presses need to come together collectively to claim the importance of translations and support more translations.

The day ended with pitching of a number of projects for translation by various publishers. Each speaker had two minutes to pitch their potential project, offering a synopsis of the book, and the selling points which provide a case for it to be translated. All in all the day was a real eye-opener into the world of translation and was a great way to connect with international colleagues.

UCL Press is pleased to announce a new marketing and distribution partnership with University of Chicago Press, the publishing imprint of University of Chicago, USA. Effective January 1, 2018, the University of Chicago Press will distribute, sell, and market UCL books in North America.

Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager of UCL Press, reflected on the new partnership: “UCL Press is keen to expand its global reach, and making its books available in the USA and Canada is a critical component of this plan. Working with a university press such as Chicago and its long-established distribution program representing other university presses and scholarly publishers is the ideal partnership to help us expand our activities in North America.”

UCL Press is the university press of UCL, a research-intensive university ranked in the top 10 universities worldwide in the QS World Rankings. Since its inception as the first fully open access university press in the UK in 2015, UCL Press has established a widely respected list of scholarly monographs and textbooks ranging across anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, environmental studies, popular science, and higher education. UCL Press publishes authors from UCL as well as many other institutions and makes all its books freely available online, as well as selling print copies through traditional retail channels.

Chicago marketing director Carol Kasper commented, “We at Chicago are delighted to welcome UCL to our family of publishers in the marketing distribution programme. UCL Press has made great strides in just a few years, and we look forward to partnering with them to raise their profile and better reach the North American market. We believe UCL books will find a good home with our growing group of client presses whose signature is serious non-fiction and scholarship.”

“We’re pleased to help introduce UCL Press’s books to our market and look forward to their great success,” added Joe D’Onofrio, Director at the Chicago Distribution Center.

Garrett Kiely, director of the University of Chicago Press, further said, “We are excited to continue to grow the Chicago Distribution Center and Chicago’s distinguished list of client publishers with the addition of UCL Press, whose high quality scholarship will fit well alongside many others in our catalog.”

The University of Chicago Press’s distinctive and diverse list of distributed publishers includes the American Meteorological Society; Amsterdam University Press; the Bard Graduate Center; the Bodleian Library; Black Rose Books; Brigham Young University; Campus Verlag; the Center for the Study of Language and Information; Conservation International; the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; Diaphanes; French National Museum of Natural History; GTA Verlag; HAU Books; Haus Publishing; Hirmer Publishers; Historic England; Intellect Books; Karolinum Press, Charles University, Prague; Leiden University Press; Logan Center Exhibitions, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts; McMullen Museum, Boston College; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; Missouri Botanical Garden Press; Missouri History Museum; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum Tusculanum Press; National University of Singapore Press; Park Books; Policy Press at the University of Bristol; Prickly Paradigm Press; Reaktion Books; Renaissance Society; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Royal Collection Trust; Scheidegger and Spiess; Seagull Books; Solar Books; Tenov Books; Unicorn Press Ltd.; University of Alaska Press; University of Exeter Press; University of Wales Press; and Zed Books.

As of January 1, 2018 all UCL Press backlist and forthcoming titles in North America will ship from the Chicago Distribution Center.

We are delighted to announce the publication of five new open access books from UCL Press in September:

New Open Access Books

• Fabricate 2011 (August 29)
• Fabricate 2014 (August 29)
• Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment (26 September)
• Bloomsbury Scientists: Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin (25 September)
• Key Concepts in Public Archaeology (28 September) 

Please note that Key Concepts in Public Archaeology was previously published as a living book and will be released for the first time as a free PDF download and in print.

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

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.

You are hereby cordially invited to the following event, organised by Library Services and UCL’s Refuge in a Moving World Network:

Thursday 1^st June 2017, 17:00-18:15
Archaeology G6 Lecture Theatre

Synopsis: A Netflix original short documentary, set in Aleppo, Syria and Turkey in early 2016. As the violence intensifies, The White Helmets follows three volunteer rescue workers as they put everything on the line to save civilians affected by the war, all the while wracked with worry about the safety of their own loved ones. Moving and inspiring, The White Helmets (winner of the 2017 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short) is both a snapshot of the harrowing realities of life for ordinary Syrians who remain in the country, and a humbling portrait of the power of the human spirit.

After the screening, a multidisciplinary panel discussion will reflect upon the issues raised, future of the region and human rights abuses within countries following the onset of civil war.

The event is free but you do have to book a seat.

Open access presents the opportunity to revolutionise how – and how widely – knowledge is disseminated. By making research outputs and teaching materials freely available online, readers worldwide can engage with them, regardless of their ability to pay.

Following the successful open access publications of Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Key Concepts in Public Archaeology, UCL Press is expanding its textbook publishing programme. It now invites applications from UCL academics to submit textbook proposals for any discipline taught at UCL at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

The expansion of our textbook programme demonstrates both UCL’s commitment to harnessing a culture of research-based learning through the Connected Curriculum, and to establishing a world-class digital learning environment.

We are particularly interested in proposals for textbooks that meet one or more of the following criteria:

• Potential to supply large student cohorts for the maximum benefit of the student experience
• Current provision is very expensive or out-of-date
• Where there is currently no textbook provision, because a course is very new, for example
• Potential to create a bespoke textbook tailored to any UCL programme

Multidisciplinary subjects are welcome, as are proposals for textbooks with a digitally innovative approach.

Awards

UCL Press plans to offer 10 awards of £1500 each to successful applicants. Payment will be on delivery of the final accepted manuscript.

Deadline and evaluation

Please submit a 300-word description of the proposed project by 1 July 2017 to Chris Penfold, UCL Press Commissioning Editor: c.penfold@ucl.ac.uk. Please explain in your description how the project meets the above criteria and what stage the project is at.

UCL Press’s Executive Group (Editorial Board) will evaluate the submissions in the first instance and will then inform authors/editors of the projects it would like to take forward as full proposals. Final acceptance of projects for publication will be dependent on receipt of a full proposal and positive peer review reports.

Production period

Applications are welcome for textbooks that will be ready for manuscript submission between now and July 2019. Publication will follow within approximately 9 months after submission of the final manuscript. Once a textbook has published, the Press will review the potential for updates and new editions where necessary.

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!