New trade-focused lists at Palgrave, Cambridge
Palgrave Macmillan has launched a new series of short, accessible books under the title Palgrave Policy Essentials. Aimed at a wide audience and incorporating policy implications and recommendations for action alongside peer-reviewed research, the books are written by academics with direct policymaking experience. The series launches with three titles, all posing questions: Claire Craig’s How Does Government Listen to Scientists, Simon Duke’s Will Brexit Damage our Security and Defence, and Patrick Diamond’s The End of Whitehall? Meanwhile, Macmillan’s Palgrave Higher Education imprint, specialising in university textbooks in the Social Sciences, Business and Management, Humanities and Study Skills, has been rebranded as Red Globe Press.
Cambridge University Press has also launched a new programme of trade-focused publishing, with 30-40 books each year to receive additional attention from the press’s editorial and sales and marketing teams. The first two titles to receive such attention will be Van Jackson’s On the Brink: Trump, Kim and the Threat of Nuclear War and Mike Berners-Lee’s There Is No Plan(et) B.
Cengage reaches agreement with authors
The court case between Cengage and two of its authors over the publisher’s new Unlimited subscription service has been dismissed after the parties reached an agreement that sees the two authors buy back one of their titles from Cengage, while others remain part of the service. The authors, David Knox and Caroline Schacht, had claimed that Cengage had unilaterally changed the ‘compensation structure’ for their titles by including them within the new service, impacting negatively upon their revenues.
Knowledge Unlatched launches new romance package and central funding database
Knowledge Unlatched is partnering with publishers Peter Lang, De Gruyter and Vervuert to create a package of 36 open access titles in the field of romance studies, with twelve books being published each year between 2019 and 2021; 12 backlist titles will also become available via open access. Knowledge Unlatched has also launched a central database for financing open access books, funded on a commission model; more than twenty publishers have already signed up.
Academic publishers dominate two categories at Saltire Awards
The shortlists for this year’s Scottish Saltire Literary Awards have been announced, with academic publishers unsurprisingly dominating the History Book of the Year and Research Book of the Year categories. The university presses of Edinburgh and Oxford both have a book on each list, the former with Cairns Craig’s The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence and the essay collection Early Cinema in Scotland, the latter with Michael Anderson’s Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today and the anthology Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts. Peter Lang, Manchester University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Princeton University Press, Humming Earth, and Yale all have titles shortlisted in one category or the other. Yale has further reason to celebrate with the news that its author William D. Nordhaus has won the Nobel Prize for Economics.
In brief
The Association of University Presses (AUP) has announced that the theme of the next University Press Week, taking place in the United States from November 12-17, will be amplifying unheard voices; the associated hashtag will be #TurnItUP. A full list of events will be posted at www.universitypressweek.org. The AUP was also approved as an associate member of the International Publishers Association at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.
SAGE has announced two new journal partnerships: it will begin publishing the American Marketing Association’s portfolio of four journals with immediate effect, while the first issue of the Australian National University’s Federal Law Review published by SAGE will appear in March 2019.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University