I’m delighted to be working with UCL Press on the publication of Four Histories about Early Dutch Football 1910–1920: Constructing Discourses. This work will use some of the research I conducted for my doctoral studies, combined with new research and approaches, to provide four new histories about football in Dutch life in the early part of the twentieth century. The work interweaves concerns about the role and purpose of history today, with questions about the nature of modern sport and its interaction with culture, politics, and society. A central aim of the book is to promote a new form of history that acknowledges that the subjectivity of the author (and reader) is not only inevitable, but also useful in the development of history as a democratic tool for the future.

I was particularly keen to work with UCL Press because of their commitment to Open Access publication, which I see as a revolutionary development in academic publishing. Free online publication means that my work and ideas will be available to as many people as possible, without the barriers often in palace in traditional academic publishing models. I’m pleased to be taking part at an early stage in this change in academic publishing. In addition, Open Access publishing has given me the opportunity to provide additional data and content online which will encourage other individuals to create their own histories about the past – which is a central theme of my work.

As a young academic, and first time author, I have loved the encouragement given by everyone at UCL Press in this project, from the initial proposal to the final stages of publication. At every stage the team has always been ready to listen to suggestions and to guide me through the difficulties and surprises involved in bringing my ideas to a wider audience. While the staff are UCL Press are ambitious in developing an ever increasing number of titles, I have always felt that the team has taken a hands on approach to the process and both understand and value the deeply personal nature of their authors’ contributions. Happy Birthday!

About the author

Nicholas Piercey is Honorary Research Associate in UCL’s Department of Dutch in the UCL School of European Languages, Culture & Society. His first book, Four Histories of Early Dutch Football, 1910-1920: Constructing Discourses (UCL Press) will be published on October 2016. Find out more at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/four-histories-about-early-dutch-football.

For our particular project, Why We Post, the creation of UCL Press was simply the perfect answer to a key question. We had already committed to open access. This is something I am personally very committed to and had previously published a paper advocating open access in an anthropology journal. I was very disappointed with the current models of Green and Gold and wanted what I think of as genuine open access, which inevitably means publication being taken back into the university system and thereby saving huge sums for libraries. I feel this strongly as anthropologist since we need to make our findings accessible to low-income people in low-income countries which are the populations that we typically study.

The additional headache was that we were committed to publishing 11 books. Having carried out nine different 15-month ethnographies we knew we had a vast amount of important new material about the use and consequences of social media, a topic of huge public interest. For us open access also means writing in an open and accessible style. But taking on 11 volumes is quite a commitment. So we needed a press with vision and ambition.

At this point we could not be happier with the result. We launched the first three books at the end of February and within a month we had over 10,000 downloads, which is almost unimaginable in traditional publishing. As people who work on digital technologies it’s great to see online books with hyperlinked chapters and endnotes that we can link to directly from our free FutureLearn e-learning course and our Why We Post website. In addition, a topic such as social media is about the rise of visual communication and it was essential for us to have many colour images included.

We feel we have been supported throughout this adventure by UCL Press, especially with regard to advertising and marketing. I have published 37 volumes and was particularly impressed by the fast turnaround from submission of final manuscripts. We are happy that there are also relatively inexpensive offline paperbacks for those who prefer physical books. But if I was to pick out one particular achievement which matters to an anthropologist it is that our books are being read in 132 countries with over 100 downloads recorded for countries as diverse as Turkey, Russia, Poland, Japan and Mexico.

About the author

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL and author of 37 books including Social Media in an English Village, The Comfort of Things, Stuff, Tales from Facebook and A Theory of Shopping.  Find out more about the Why We Post series at  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/why-we-post.

This post by Laura Haapio Kirk originally appeared on the Global Social media Project blog on 14th March. It has been reposted with permission; statistics have been updated.

Since our launch on the 29th February, the first three open access books in the Why We Post series have been downloaded over 10,000 times! 10,000 downloads in just a month makes for a very happy team. The entire series of 11 volumes will continue to be released by UCL Press over the coming year, so keep your eyes peeled.

News has spread far and wide of our project and its ambitious public dissemination strategy comprising not only of our books, but a free e-course and a website with films and stories from our nine fieldsites. In the past two weeks we’ve enjoyed global media coverage and have been thrilled with the response from learners on our course who come from all over the world.

Press round-up:

English:

The Economist (05/03/2016  print and online): The Medium is the Messengers: A global study reveals how people fit social media into their lives

“These fly-on-the-wall perspectives refute much received wisdom… ‘Why We Post’ thus challenges the idea that the adoption of social media follows a single and predictable trajectory.”

The Economist – (02/03/2016  online): Babbage Podcast: From headers to footies (from 06:33)

“(Why We Post is) the biggest, most ambitious project of its sort.”

BBC World Service – (29/02/2016 radio): World Business Report (from 4:13)

BBC Click (02/03/2016 radio): What is the Point of Posting on Social Media

“… a global snapshot of our relationship with the social media… This is a nuanced picture of a world coming to terms with a rapidly evolving way of connecting, or even disconnecting, with something unexpected pretty much everywhere the researchers looked.”

“What’s really heartening about this study and the research is you see people taking the technology seriously, looking at the things it makes possible, the things that it interferes with, the new forms of social exchange that become feasible when you have smart phones and internet and social networks, actually looking at how it affects us as people. It’s really vital that this work continues… It’s a sense of a discipline emerging, or rather that the discipline of anthropology is properly embracing social media as an important part of human society… What they’re doing is identifying core principles, like the fact that social media can help create privacy. It’s a really important insight and that’s not going to change, even if it’s no longer Facebook, it’s something new.” – Bill Thompson, BBC Technology writer

CBBC Newsround (29/03/2016 TV): Two mentions of ‘footies’ on the morning and afternoon programmes.

BBC World Service – (29/02/2016 radio): World Update (from 8:51)

BBC Radio 4  (29/02/2016 radio): Today Programme (from 2:54:32)

CNN (29/2/2016 online) Social media puts users in the driver’s seat

The Hindu (19/3/2016) Why We Post on Social Media

Times of India (9/3/2016 print/online) Socialising over caste is the new norm in rural India, says global study

Australian Financial review (9/3/2016 online): Is social media all about narcissism?

Spanish:

BBC Mundo (05/03/2016 online): De “Footies” en Chile a “uglies” en Inglaterra, cómo el mundo cambió las redes

BBC Mundo (09/03/2016 online): La artista argentina de Instagram que engañó a miles de personas

Portuguese:

O Globo (07/03/2016 online and print): Pesquisa mostra diversidade do uso das redes sociais pelo mundo

Italian

Wired Italia (29/2/2016 online/print) I social media ci avvicinano alle persone, e decidiamo noi come usarli

Inside Marketing (online) Perché postiamo sui social?

Italy Journal (29/3/2016 online) A era das redes sociais

Chinese

cw.com.tw: 為何我們要貼文？ 自戀、威脅隱私，還是讓人不思考？

This article was originally published on the UCL Development Planning Unit blog. It has been reposted with permission.

After the Paris Agreement roll up your sleeves: much work will be needed, and participatory planning can help to put citizens at the centre of climate change adaptation efforts.

The COP21 in Paris ended up with a rush of optimism. After a nerve-racking end of conference, the French government finally announced an agreed text for the agreement on the 12 of December. What happened next is the stuff of legend: a technical complaint from the US led to further space for complaining. Nicaragua raised the obvious: that existing voluntary commitments do not add to the emissions reductions needed for a safe climate future. Nervous phone calls allegedly involving everyone, even the Pope Francis, to assure that the agreement was coming through. And then, the euphoria.

There are of course many untied ends and questions to answer. Understandably, there are serious problems with the agreement from the voluntary nature of national commitments to the scale of ambition required. But the Agreement made a clear point: climate change needs a serious compromise by everyone. After the disappointing experience of 2009 in Copenhagen, the Paris Agreement is a great success. In the coming years our task will be to use that agreement to achieve climate justice, both facilitating a transition to a low carbon society and protecting those who are already suffering the impacts of climate change.

A key realisation emerging in the last decade of climate policy is that effective action for climate change mitigation and adaptation can happen in any corner and led by anybody. This is why in 2011 DPU’s Vanesa Castan Broto led a team of academic practitioners – or pracademics, as they like to call themselves – to learn how communities, even in very poor areas, can work together to adapt to climate change. The experience was life changing. So much was learned that they decided to share the whole process in a book. This book has now been published by UCL Press, in a bilingual edition in English and Portuguese. With this book we hope to influence the way sustainable cities are thought of, putting common citizens at the heart of building resilience.

The book is available to download on this website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/participatory-planning-for-climate-compatible-development-in-maputo

I have just completed my year mandate as the managing editor of the UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. Those who know me are aware that I dip my toes both in academia and the tech startup world. And that gives me a rather unusual perspective on both. If one would ask “What were the two things that made you most proud at the journal?” I would simply say switching to open access and developing a social media presence. Both bring the powers of the digital in the service of research, making it faster, more relevant, and more connected to the outside world.