Academic Publishing – January 2021

Academic Publishing – January 2021

Applications open for Princeton’s new diversity initiative

Princeton University Press has opened applications for its Diversify Publishing Fellowships, a new initiative intended to address a lack of diverse representation across the publishing industry. Designed for individuals with no prior publishing experience from communities historically underrepresented within American publishing, two fellowships will be awarded each year for the next five years. The full-time, salaried positions will incorporate mentoring and training, and do not require an undergraduate degree.

New journal and book series for UCL Press

UCL Press has added the UCL Institute of Archaeology journal Archaeology International to its growing portfolio of journals. Founded in 1997 and appearing annually since then, the journal was previously published by Ubiquity and becomes UCL Press’s fifteenth open access journal.

The press has also announced the launch of a new book series, Knowledge and the Curriculum, which aims to explore the nature of knowledge in contemporary societies, academic disciplines, school subjects, and other fields of knowledge production. Two books in the series have already been published, a second edition of What Should Schools Teach? and Knowing History in Schools: Powerful Knowledge and the Powers of Knowledge.

Pluto journals flip to open access

London-based social sciences publisher Pluto Journals has successfully flipped its complete portfolio of 21 journals to open access. Working in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, and supported by Libraria, developers of the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model, Pluto persuaded libraries and institutions subscribing to its journals to renew for 2021 on a subscribe-to-open basis, thus unlocking the content for all.

In brief

De Gruyter has acquired the phonetic science journal Phonetica from Swiss publisher Karger, which had published the title for more than sixty years since its launch in 1957.

Emily Poznanski, currently Director of Strategy at De Gruyter, will be joining the Central European University Press (CEU Press) on 15 February as its new Director. Poznanski’s experience in open access with De Gruyter and Polish start-up Versita will prove vital in her new role, as CEU Press moves towards an open access publishing model through its new Opening the Future library membership scheme.

Trier University, based in Germany, has become the latest institution to join the Open Library of the Humanities’s Library Partnership Subsidy system.

Oxford University Press has launched a new platform for its well-known Oxford World’s Classics series. An initial 300 titles, including works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, will be made available to institutions via a perpetual access licence.

The Association of University Presses has responded to the attack on the US Capitol by violent insurrectionists on 6 January by calling on government and civic leaders ‘to acknowledge that facts matter, that words have power, and that demagoguery from any source when left unchallenged is harmful to the fabric of democratic institutions and societies.’

Bristol University Press has helped raise more than £13,000 for local charity Julian House through a combination of its own fund-raising efforts and the generosity of its community of academic peer reviewers, who enthusiastically took up the option of donating to the charity their honorarium for reviewing for the press.


Academic Publishing – January 2021 - Alastair Horne

Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.

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