Oxford’s annual report highlights a good year for academic
Oxford University Press has released its annual report for the financial year 2017-18. Though overall press turnover is down 0.9% on the previous year and its surplus down by 7.3% (revised down to 1.5% when adjusted for currency fluctuations), Oxford’s academic business outperformed its other units, with revenues for books, journals, licensing, and higher education all growing. Journal usage climbed 10%, and translation deals hit a new high. Digital products now account for more than half of academic revenues, and continued investment in this area is described as central to the press’s plans. Noting the twin challenges for publishers of mounting pressures on library book-buying budgets, and growing expectations by funders that the research they support should be freely and openly available, the report highlights Oxford’s first combined Open Access and subscription deals with two major consortia, describing such deals as a positive step that will nevertheless generate further complexities both for Oxford and across the industry.
New CEO for Boydell & Brewer
Boydell & Brewer have appointed James Powell as their new CEO, replacing Peter Clifford, who had led the company since 2005 and had overseen its move to employee ownership in 2015. Powell had for the past year worked as Director of Publisher Relations (Books) at ProQuest but is best known for a sixteen-year spell as Managing Director for Pickering and Chatto before its sale to Taylor & Francis in March 2015.
Journals developments in Liverpool
Liverpool University Press has announced that it has taken on the publication of Archives, the journal of the British Records Association, from Spring 2019 and will be providing online access to back issues for the first time. Another LUP journal, Francosphères, will be moving to an open access model as part of the press’s ongoing partnership with the Open Library of the Humanities; it is the second Liverpool journal to make the switch, after Quaker Studies last year.
Cambridge adds textbooks to its digital platform
Cambridge University Press has announced that its digital platform Cambridge Core will for the first time provide digital access to its academic textbooks. The initial launch of the offering will comprise three hundred titles across twenty subjects, with more to follow over the course of the next year.
SAGE acquires Feminist Review
SAGE has announced that it will be publishing the Feminist Review from January next year. Founded in 1979, the journal was previously published by Palgrave Macmillan, and includes creative and political work alongside academic articles.
PaperHive adds content
Collaborative academic reading platform PaperHive has added open access titles from two new sources to its database. More than nine hundred monographs published through Knowledge Unlatched’s library pledge model, plus its sixteen journals, and the entire list of open access monographs by German publisher Transcript are now available to be read, annotated, and discussed on the PaperHive platform.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University