Academic Publishing – June 2022
Independent Emerald bought by Cambridge Information Group
The Emerald Group, comprising Emerald Publishing and its corporate-learning division Emerald Works, has been acquired by Cambridge Information Group, a New York based investment firm. Founded in 1967 by a group of management academics at the University of Bradford, Emerald was run for more than fifty years as an independent publisher; co-founder and company owner Dr Keith Howard OBE died last year at the age of 89, having stepped down as chairman in 2017. Cambridge Information Group was the owner of ProQuest Information and Learning for fifteen years before the sale of the company to Clarivate last year.
University presses aim to open up book publishing for ECRs
Six UK university presses – Bristol, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, UCL, and the University of Wales – have launched a pilot project aiming to help UK-based early career academics publish their first books open access. The three-year pilot aims to raise £96,000 annually from library subscriptions to fund the publication of twelve titles each year. The first titles to be supported by the project are scheduled to be published in 2023.
Liverpool hits two open access targets
Liverpool University Press has achieved a double success with its open access initiatives. Its Opening the Future library membership programme has now reached the funding threshold for its first two fully open access titles: Empire Found: Racial Identities and Coloniality in Twenty-First Century Portuguese Popular Cultures by Daniel F. Silva, and Football and Nation Building in Columbia by Peter J. Watson. The programme was launched last year as a collaboration between Liverpool and COPIM – with support from LYRASIS and Jisc – as a means of supporting the open access publication of monographs through collective library funding.
A second Liverpool initiative, LUP Open Planning, has also reached its target. This Subscribe to Open project, in partnership with Jisc and LYRASIS, will see all content in 2022 from the journals Town Planning Review and International Development Planning Review made freely available via open access.
New platform for Bristol
Bristol University Press has launched a new platform, Bristol University Press Digital, which brings together for the first time in a single place its journals and ebooks. Hosting 1400 books, 18 journals, and 60 open access titles, the platform will also be home to Bristol’s new, non-profit open access title, the Global Social Challenges Journal.
New and deeper partnership for OLH
The Open Library of the Humanities has announced that ETH Library (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) has become the latest member of its Library Partnership Subsidy system, helping to fund the fee-free open access publication of research. OLH has also confirmed that its in-house publishing platform Janeway has partnered with three more institutions to migrate their journals to its systems: Ghent University Library, the University of Iowa Libraries, and Washington University in St Louis.
Journals in brief
Cambridge University Press has taken on publication of the open access psychology journal Judgment and Decision Making, jointly owned by the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the European Association of Decision Making, previously self-published by the editorial team.
SAGE Publishing has partnered with the Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPAx) to launch a new journal, Environment and Security, focusing on linkages between the environment, climate, security, conflict, and peace; the first quarterly issue will be published in late 2023.
Alastair Horne is a lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling.