Ridout new MD at Bloomsbury
Jenny Ridout has been appointed as the new MD of Bloomsbury’s Non-Consumer division, which includes the publisher’s academic and professional business. She will be taking over from Jonathan Glasspool, who retires in July.
Redux to return online
The biennial University Press Redux conference, originally due to take place this week in Cambridge before the Coronavirus pandemic caused its postponement, will take place this summer as an open, online event. Organisers ALPSP and Cambridge University Press have announced that those who had paid to attend the original event will be offered a choice between receiving a refund and using their registration fee to help crowdfund the event. The next Redux conference, scheduled to take place in 2022, will now be held in Cambridge.
Liverpool acquires Auteur, moves into audio
Liverpool University Press, who hosted the first Redux conference back in 2016, has acquired the respected Film Studies books publisher Auteur. Owner John Atkinson will continue to commission the list for Liverpool. LUP has also joined the growing ranks of academic audiobook publishers: its first title, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript in Modern English Prose Translation, has just been released. Narrated by the medievalist and broadcaster Professor Sarah Peverley, it comprises a near-literal translation of what is widely considered one of the masterpieces of Middle English literature.
Pinter in new central European role
Frances Pinter, founder of Knowledge Unlatched and former CEO of Manchester University Press, has been appointed to the newly created post of executive chair of the Central European University Press, based in Budapest, Hungary. The appointment marks a return by Pinter to the humanities and social sciences publisher she founded in the mid-1990s, working with philanthropist George Soros.
Former CEU Press director and editor Krisztina Kós, meanwhile, has been appointed director of a new publisher, CEEOL Press. Founded by the Central and Eastern European Online Library, a Frankfurt-based provider of HSS journals and ebooks covering central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe, CEEOL Press will combine publishing books about the region for a general and professional scholarly audience with offering distribution partnerships to academic publishers and authors in central and eastern Europe.
New heroes and partners in open access publishing
Knowledge Unlatched has announced its Open Access Heroes for 2020, marking the fact that the total number of interactions – downloads and views – with titles in its collections has grown by 50% in 2019 to more than 3 million. The United States was top in terms both of supporting institutions and total interactions, while the top title was Ralph Schroeder’s Social Theory of the Internet (UCL Press). Top publisher was Transcript, while the top institutions in terms of interactions was John Hopkins University.
Three more institutions have joined the Open Library of Humanities’ Library Partnership Subsidy system: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Kassel in Germany, and the University of Winnipeg in Canada.
In brief
Edinburgh University Press has announced an agreement with Ingram Academic Services which will see the latter provide distribution, sales, and academic marketing services for EUP in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, from June 2020.
The Performance Philosophy series, currently comprising 22 scholarly monographs and edited collections, will be published by Rowman and Littlefield going forwards, with the first four R&L-published titles appearing in the autumn.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.