Hot off the press & straight on the web

The six months since the launch of UCL Press have been extremely busy. During this time, UCL Press has managed to launch eight open access books, two journals and managed an extremely successful Open Access conference with over 120 delegates (with assistance from UCL Open Access and UCL Discovery). The UCL Press team have also spoken at a number of events- Society for Young Publishers conference, Academic Book of the Future projects showcase evening at the British Library and the Futurebook conference, to name but a few- and contributed articles about the press to UKSG enews and Insights.

Lisa Jardine

We were also deeply saddened to hear of the death of Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and author of UCL Press’ inaugural title, Temptation in the Archives. Professor Jardine was a distinguished scholar, and we are honoured to have published her final work.

Books

The eight UCL Press books have managed to achieve in excess of 9500 open access downloads from over 100 countries. Titles published so far are varied and include:

• Temptation in the Archives by Lisa Jardine (June 2015)
• Treasures from UCL edited by Gillian Furlong (June 2015)
• The Petrie Museum of Egyptology: Characters and Collections by Alice Stevenson (June 2015)
• Burning Bright: A Tribute to David Bindman edited by Diana Dethlof et al (September 2015)
• Herman Gorter- Poems of 1890: A Selection translated by Paul Vincent (October 2015)
• Biostratigraphic and Geological Significance of Planktonic Foraminifera, 2e by Marcelle K. BouDagher-Fadel (October 2015)
• Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street edited by Laura Vaughan (November 2015)
• Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique by Vanesa Castán Broto et al (November 2015)

We’re delighted to announce that our Spring list will include a number of titles from the Why We Post project, an ground breaking ethnographic study of social media in 8 countries worldwide. The series will contain 11 books, but Spring 2015 include How the World Changed Social Media, Social Media in an English Village, and Social Media in Southeast Turkey. The project’s output will also include UCL’s first MOOC (via Futurelearn), and a website focusing on the project’s findings. To keep up-to-date on UCL Press activities, visit the UCL Press website or follow us on Twitter @uclpress.

Journals

Journals currently published by UCL Press include Architecture_MPS (Architecture Media Politics Society) which addresses the growing interest in the social and political interpretation of the built environment from a multi-disciplinary perspective and London Journal of Canadian Studies, an interdisciplinary journal specialising in Canadian history, politics and society. From early 2016, our rapidly growing journals programme will also include Jewish Historical Studies: Transitions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, which has been published since 1831.

Call for proposals

Spotlights series

Proposals for short monographs are invited from UCL authors wishing to make new or defining elements of their work accessible to a wide audience. The series will provide a responsive forum for researchers to share key developments in their discipline and reach across disciplinary boundaries. The series also aims to support a diverse range of approaches to undertaking research and writing it. We welcome proposals for books of 35,000 to 45,000 words from all disciplines that share any of these aims. The books will be published free in a digital Open Access form, and will also be available to buy in print at an affordable price.

Contact: Chris Penfold, Commissioning Editor, UCL Press

BOOC

The AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project invites submissions for its BOOC (Book as Open Online Content), which will capture and publish outputs of the research project. The content will be published as a ‘live’ book on an innovative, online and open platform hosted by UCL Press.

Authors are welcome to discuss any aspect of academic publishing and its future; for example, peer review, the role of the editor, the academic bookshop of the future, copyright, libraries, open access, digital publishing and technology. Suitable content will undergo peer review before being published.

Formats may include, but are not limited to, videos, blogs, podcasts, short monographs and articles, and authors are invited from all areas of the academic publishing and bookselling communities. The BOOC will be launched in Spring 2016 and new content will be added throughout the year.

Contact: Sam Rayner, Principal Investigator of the Academic Book of the Future Project with abstracts of proposed content (500 word max.).

UCL Open Access conference

The UCL Press team had a busy and eventful Open Access Week presenting and attending a number of talks and events at other universities, and culminating in UCL’s own Open Access conference. With around 120 attendees it was the best attended UCL Open Access conference so far, and delegates came from numerous institutions and a wide range of backgrounds – librarians, funders, repository managers, academics, students and publishers were present.

Focusing on the theme of ‘Publishing Options’, the speakers represented a range of Open Access activities and publishing models. Dr Alma Swan, Convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship, an organisation of university managers around the world that promotes the principles of open scholarship and open science, and a director of the Directory of Open Access Journals, gave a broad overview of Open Access take-up across Europe, including a fascinating insight into the different strategies used by universities to encourage their academics to make their published work available in institutional repositories. This formed the perfect backdrop to the talks that followed, each of them showing a different model of Open Access publishing.

Dr Martin Paul Eve, one of the founders of the recently launched Open Library of the Humanities journals platform, talked eloquently about the problems with the current publishing ecosystem and how Open Access can be achieved – without charging APCs to authors – by scholars, publishers, funders and libraries working together. OLH has had support from 112 libraries round the world in the first 10 months. This truly collaborative, not-for-profit model is also attracting much interest from journals wishing to join.

Ros Pyne, Research and Development Manager for Open Research, Nature-Springer / Palgrave Macmillan, described the ways that the company supports Open Access publishing, including significant investment in technology, over 550 fully Open Access journals, market research into the publishing needs of academics, and waiver schemes for researchers from low-income countries and those who can demonstrate no other means of securing funding.

Finally, Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager of the newly re-launched UCL Press spoke about the experience of establishing the UK’s first fully Open Access university press. UCL has been at the forefront of supporting OA initiatives for some time, and the addition of an Open Access press to UCL’s OA offerings to its academics has proved very popular, with well over 100 proposals for books received in the first 18 months or so. All books published by the Press so far have been downloaded in their hundreds – and thousands in two cases – within less than five months of publication.

These figures were commented on by many, including David Prosser, Executive Director of RLUK, who joined the speakers for the final panel session. He noted that usage figures in the thousands was significantly higher than typical expectations for print sales of scholarly books, demonstrating that the readership is there – when scholarly publications can be made freely available. The panel went on to discuss the ongoing challenges of how to achieve this as well as reflecting on some of the solutions that had been presented by the speakers.

Dr Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services, and CEO of UCL Press, chaired the event and rounded off the afternoon with an announcement by LERU (the League of European Research Universities) calling on the European Commission to work with stakeholders to support the transition to Open Access by bringing sensible solutions to the fore. LERU asks universities, research institutes, research funders and researchers to sign the statement.

Alison Major, Marketing and Distribution Manager, UCL Press