Two new open access monograph models from Cambridge and Liverpool
Cambridge University Press has launched a pilot for a new open access initiative, Flip It Open, that will see its most successful monographs flip to open access once they have achieved a certain level of revenue through traditional sales models. More than twenty-five books across classics, politics and history will feature in the pilot; in addition to being made freely available as open access downloads through the Cambridge Core platform, successful titles will also be republished in affordable paperback editions. The pilot is intended to offer a route to open access that doesn’t require up-front publication charges for authors; the first book in the pilot will be published later this month.
Cambridge is not the only publisher launching a new model for open access monographs this month. Liverpool University Press has announced that it is building on its existing open access programmes through an innovative monograph funding initiative called Opening the Future. Run in partnership with the international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers, and infrastructure providers COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs), the initiative will offer libraries subscriptions to two series of backlist titles in the field of modern languages, with the revenues used to fund the publication of new open access monographs.
AUP announces new president, recognises outstanding contribution
Lisa Bayer has assumed the presidency of the Association of University Presses following her election at the AUP’s virtual Annual Business Meeting in May. Director of the University of Georgia Press, Bayer takes over from Oxford University Press president Niko Pfund; director of the University of Michigan Press Charles Watkinson was named President-Elect. The association also presented author, professor, activist, and lifelong advocate for Asian American literature Shawn Wong with its Stand UP Award, given to advocates not working at presses who have nevertheless done extraordinary work to support, defend, and celebrate the university press community. Wong received the award in recognition of his work protecting the right of University of Washington Press to continue publishing the 1957 novel No-No Boy by Japanese American author John Okada after Penguin Random House published their own edition in 2019 in the belief that the work had entered the public domain.
Lockett leaves Westminster after hitting a million
Open access publisher University of Westminster Press has announced that press manager Andrew Lockett, in place since the press’s launch in 2015, is to step down next month. Over the past six years, UWP has published 36 books, 7 policy briefs, and 6 journals, and recently reached the milestone of more than one million downloads and views of its titles from almost two hundred countries. Its most popular books have been Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism, The Propaganda Model Today, , and the Critical Theory of Communication.
In brief
Cambridge University Press has appointed a new Equality Diversity Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB) Director, ahead of its August merger with Cambridge Assessment. Serita Bonsignore has spent the past four years specialising in equality and inclusion, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence and technology.
The Open Library of the Humanities has signed up two more institutions to its Library Partnership Subsidy system. The University of Chichester and Germany’s University of Göttingen will, like the system’s other members, both contribute funding to help support the cost of open access publication and take their place on the OLH Library Board.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.