Awards season promises rewards for academic publishers
Awards season is already in full swing, and the shortlist for the IPG’s Independent Publishing Awards has just been announced. The four nominees for the ProQuest Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year include Bloomsbury’s Academic and Professional Division, currently celebrating its tenth anniversary, legal and healthcare publisher Class Publishing, Kogan Page – nominated for the second year in succession, and SAGE. The winner will be revealed at a Gala Dinner during the IPG’s Spring Conference on Thursday 2 May 2019
University presses dominate the six-strong shortlist for this year’s Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most valuable non-fiction prize. Oxford and Yale each have two titles shortlisted – Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice and Jeremy Mynott’s Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words for Oxford; and Empress: Queen Victoria and India by Miles Taylor and Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln for Yale; Princeton is also shortlisted with John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England. The winner of the £40,000 prize will be announced on 11 June. The nominations continue a good year for Oxford on the prizes front, after Jeffrey C. Stewart won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.
Stanford faces funding shortfall
The future financial viability of Stanford University Press is said to be in question after its parent university rejected the press’s request for a continuation of its $1.7 million annual subsidy for a further five years. Press director Alan Harvey is said to be considering options for a more sustainable revenue model, while critics have pointed out that Stanford’s endowment is currently worth $26.5 billion.
New ancient history series for Liverpool
Liverpool University Press has announced the launch of a new book series, Liverpool Studies in Ancient History, which will focus on the history of the Greek and Roman worlds, particularly through the lenses of politics, economy, culture and society. The series will contain single-author and edited volumes, with scope for additional digital materials.
SAGE acquires four more journals
SAGE has announced four new partnerships to publish journals: Studia Liturgica, a biannual peer-reviewed journal, will be published in partnership with Societas Liturgica; the ECNU Review of Education (ROE) in partnership with East China Normal University (ECNU) and East China Normal University Press (ECNUP), Shanghai, China; the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, the world’s longest-running major journal within the early childhood sector, will be published in partnership with Early Childhood Australia, and Dramatherapy will appear in partnership with the British Association of Dramatherapists.
OLH turns another journal open access
Ethnologia Europaea, a journal of European Ethnology, has joined the Open Library of the Humanities and is now free to publish and read for authors and readers; founded in 1967, the journal has since 2015 been the flagship journal for the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF).
White Rose titles now available through JSTOR
White Rose University Press has announced that its books are now available for download via JSTOR and have received a total of almost 1500 views and downloads since the beginning of this year.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.