University of London Press relaunched as open access publisher
The University of London Press, originally founded in 1910, is to be relaunched as an inclusive open access humanities publisher facilitating collaborative, scholar-led interchange within and beyond the academy. Based at London’s School of Advanced Study, the press – which between 1949 and 1979 operated under the name of Athlone Press – will be managed by Emily Morrell and Kerry Whitston. In addition to new publications, selected titles from the press’s 600-strong backlist will also be digitised and made freely available.
Bloomsbury’s Glasspool to retire
Bloomsbury Non-Consumer MD Jonathan Glasspool will be retiring in July next year, the company has announced. Glasspool, who joined Bloomsbury in 1999 after spells at Elsevier and Cambridge, and founded its Academic division nine years later, will help to recruit his successor.
New audio partnership for Princeton
Princeton University Press, which recently launched a new website, has announced a new audiobook publishing partnership with RBmedia, the world’s largest independent audiobook publisher. The deal will see a selection of more than 120 frontlist and backlist titles from Princeton published in audiobook formats across a range of RBmedia imprints over the next three years, with titles on Orwell and Chaucer already scheduled.
Busy month for crowdfunded scholarship
The past month has seen a flurry of developments in the field of crowdfunding academic publications. De Gruyter has partnered with a consortium led by the Göttingen State and University Library, aiming to finance the publication of more than fifty new open access titles in the humanities in 2020, provided that minimum partnership targets are reached. Rather than paying to buy print books or license ebooks, participating libraries contribute to the cost of publishing titles in open access formats.
Cambridge University Press has partnered with crowdfunded publisher Unbound on a campaign to fund the publication of a new monograph on Scottish nationalism. If the target is reached, an open access ebook edition of the title will be made available online through the Cambridge Core platform.
Three new partners have signed up to the Open Library of the Humanities Library Partnership Subsidy system: Lancashire’s Edge Hill University, the National Library of the Netherlands, and Columbia University’s network of libraries.
Meanwhile, scholarly crowdfunding pioneer Knowledge Unlatched has issued an Impact Report covering the period from 2014 to the present. Total interactions with the 1500 books unlatched through KU’s various initiatives have now hit 4 million, with the most popular book, Pluto Press’s A People’s History of Modern Europe, receiving 67,000 global interactions.
Five up for user experience award
OpenAthens has announced a five-strong shortlist for its ‘Best publisher user experience award’, comprising Bloomsbury Digital Resources, Cambridge Core, Emerald Insight, Manchester University Press’s manchester hive and manchester openhive, and Fulcrum from the University of Michigan Press. The winner will be announced at the Open Athens Access Lab conference in London on 19 March 2020.
New Irish Literature series for Liverpool
Liverpool University Press, which has just added a Digital Modern Languages section to its open access platform, Modern Languages Open, has announced the launch of a new series in Irish Literature, exploring a diverse range of texts, themes, moments, figures and networks in Irish literature from c.1800 through to the present.
SAGE partners with JISC, releases new white paper
SAGE is now supplying full-text PDFs to JISC’s Publications Router service, enabling institutional repositories to automatically ingest work by their researchers. The publisher has also released a new white paper supporting the development and use of new technologies in social science research.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.