Cambridge makes sound investment
Cambridge University Press has announced that it is publishing five of its more trade-oriented academic titles as audiobooks, available directly from the Press and through a range of retailers and subscription services. The first four titles include books on the attention economy, the environment, the evolution of the mind, and the threat of nuclear war; a volume on the history of crack will follow later this year, with further audiobooks under consideration if this pilot programme is successful.
Busy month for Emerald
It’s been an extremely busy month for Bingley-based Emerald Publishing, which has announced the forthcoming launch of an entirely new version of Emerald Insight, its digital research platform for the social sciences. Developed in partnership with twelve international universities, software providers Alfresco and MarkLogic, and the software development consultancy 67 Bricks, the new platform will go live in July, hosting more than 300 journals, 3,000 books, and 1,700 case studies. The company has also acquired the digital learning and performance support company Mind Tools, whose resources help 24 million learners globally each year to develop their management, leadership, and personal effectiveness skills. Additionally, Emerald has signed up to the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which aims to ‘improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated’ and signed a ‘read and publish’ deal with fourteen academic institutions in the Netherlands via the SURF consortium.
SAGE publishes dramatic archive; acquires more journals
SAGE subsidiary Adam Matthew Digital will be publishing the archives of Shakespeare’s Globe online, comprising materials from more than two hundred productions since the reconstructed theatre opened in 1997. The company has also announced that it has taken on publication of the Journal of Eurasian Studies, the flagship journal of the Asia-Pacific Research Centre, Hanyang University, and the four open access journals of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA): Africa Spectrum, the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and the Journal of Politics in Latin America.
New partners for Open Library of the Humanities
The Open Library of the Humanities has announced several additions to its Library Partnership Subsidy system. New individual partners include the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, Switzerland’s Zurich University of the Arts – along with its Media and Information Centre – and the Library of Duisburg-Essen University in Germany, while eleven institutions from the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) have joined via the OLH’s new Open Consortial Offer.
In brief
Publisher Peter Lang has agreed a distribution deal with NBN International which will see the company handle sales and distribution for all its print titles in the UK, Commonwealth, and non-German and French speaking European countries.
After announcing an ‘extraordinary’ year last year, with sales increasing by 30%, Yale University Press’s London branch has reported a more challenging financial year for the twelve months ending June 2018, with income down 18% to £7.5m, though this figure is still up 3.6% on 2016.
Amsterdam University Press has announced a new partnership with Figshare on a branded repository portal that will allow researchers to submit manuscripts and supplementary data and receive tracked usage metrics and a citeable DOI.
Kate Farquhar-Thomson has left Oxford University Press after twenty years to take up the role of Head of Publicity (Europe) at Princeton University Press.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been named the most influential banned book of all time in a poll during this year’s Academic Book Week; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and George Orwell’s 1984 were runners-up.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.