New online courses from Cambridge
Cambridge University Press has launched Cambridge Advance Online, a new programme of short, cross-disciplinary online courses created and run by academics from the University of Cambridge. Fifty courses are to be developed over the next five years, priced at around £2,000 each, with initial offerings including ‘Product Technology Roadmapping’ and ‘Bionanotechnology from Theory to Practice’. The programme is the first output from Cambridge Online Education, a new design and development unit intended to strengthen partnerships between the university, the Press and Cambridge Assessment.
CUP has also announced that Berlin-based journalist Trish Lorenz is the winner of the Nine Dots Prize for 2020-21. Described as ‘a prize for a book that has not yet been written’, the award sets a question each two years – this year’s was ‘What does it mean to be young in an ageing world?’ – and rewards the winner with $100,000 and a book deal with the Press. 700 entries were received from 92 countries, and Lorenz’s winning response focused on the youth populations of several sub-Saharan African countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.
AUP Annual Report
The Association of University Presses has issued its annual report for 2021, addressing how its 156 member presses have responded to both COVID-19 and systemic racism, and highlighting initiatives such as the Global Partner Program and Ask UP, its collaborations with humanities scholars, public practitioners, and other organizations, and the success of the online version of its annual Book, Jacket, and Journal Show.
New journals and archive from Liverpool
Liverpool University Press will be launching a new journal, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, next year; it will serve as a forum for scholars interested in the world’s connectedness between 1780 and 1914. The press has also launched two new journal archives in Political History and Modern Languages, bringing together content from journals spanning seventy years.
New transformative deals
Emerald publishing has signed two new transformative agreements. A three-year deal with the FinELib Consortium will provide researchers at 33 of its member institutions with access to more than 200,000 articles from 310 journals plus publishing vouchers for use with all Emerald hybrid journals, Gold OA journals, and the Emerald Open Research peer review platform.
A two-year deal with CzechELib – the National Centre for Electronic Information Resources of the Czech Republic – will give researchers from seven of its institutions access to articles from Emerald’s Premier collection and Management portfolio and a selected set of journals from subject-specific collections; they will also gain publishing vouchers usable in all Emerald hybrid journals in their institution’s bespoke collections.
The Czech consortium has also signed a deal with Taylor & Francis enabling 18 of its institutions to publish open access – and also to access subscription content – in more than 2,000 T&F journals; additionally, 50% of the institutions’ previous output will be made OA this year and 100% OA by next year.
Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum later this week
The London Book Fair’s Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum takes place this Thursday, 10 June, part of this year’s Online Book Fair. Speakers will include Dr David Sweeney, Executive Chair at Research England, and Dr Sudeshna Sarkar, Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and the forum theme is ‘How Open Are We?’
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.