Oxford set to confirm US read-and-publish deal
Oxford University Press has agreed in principle its first Read and Publish deal outside Europe. The deal with the Iowa State University Library is expected to be finalised by the end of the year and will see researchers gaining read access to the full OUP journals collection with the option to publish their work in an Oxford open access journal.
Academic Book Week to return in 2020
Academic Book Week will return for a fifth time next year, run by the Booksellers Association in partnership with Midas PR. Running from Monday 9th to Friday 13th March, the week will focus on the environment, with events likely to include debates, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, and competitions; anyone interested in running an event can register here. Previous years’ events have featured a vote on the most influential academic book in certain categories, with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species last year being voted the most influential banned book of all time.
New website for open monograph initiative
Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), the five-year pilot project established by the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) to develop a new, sustainable system for monograph publishing, has launched a new website, www.openmonographs.org, to highlight the initiative’s innovative nature. The project now comprises 60 university presses and 17 academic institutions, with Rice University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville being the most recent additions.
New monograph series from Liverpool
Liverpool University Press has announced a new series of monographs on medieval and early modern history. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Belief and Culture, which will be edited by the University of Liverpool’s Marios Costambeys and Martin Heale, will cover topics from late antiquity to the seventeenth century.
Bloomsbury buys Oberon
Bloomsbury has acquired Oberon books, founded in 1985 to specialise in drama and the performing arts, with a backlist of more than 1500 titles including British theatre, world drama in translation, and academic titles in performance studies.
OLH signs up its largest consortium
The Open Library of the Humanities has announced the largest consortium yet to join its open access publishing partnership model. The Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link) consortium, founded in 1998, comprises 43 institutions across Greece, including all the country’s academic institutions along with 15 research centres. The deal takes the number of institutions supporting the OLH’s author-fee-free model to nearly three hundred.
Two interdisciplinary Brepols journals added to ScienceOpen
Research discovery platform ScienceOpen has partnered with Belgian humanities publisher Brepols to integrate two journals, the Journal of the History of Environment and Society and the European Yearbook of the History of Psychology, into its open platform.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.