Academic presses in contention for awards
Scholarly publishers are well represented on the shortlists for this year’s Independent Publishing Awards. In addition to the five publishers in the running for the PLS Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year Award – Bloomsbury Publishing, Bristol University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, Emerald Publishing, and Kogan Page – several are shortlisted for other awards. Kogan Page is also in contention for both the International Achievement Award and for the IPG Digital Publishing Award, where it faces competition from Bloomsbury; Bristol University Press is also up for the Marketing Award for its campaign for The Class Ceiling, while Cambridge University Press is one of three candidates for the Sustainability Award. The winners will all be revealed in a special online presentation on Tuesday 22 September.
Cambridge launches new website; responds to UKRI open access policy review
Cambridge University Press has launched a new website for its higher education textbooks. Built on the same technology base as Cambridge’s books and journals platform Cambridge Core, Higher Education from Cambridge University Press provides institutional access to either individual titles or collections for an unlimited number of concurrent users. 540 titles are currently available via the platform, with a further 200 to be added by October; audio, video, and interactive content will be made available in the next few months.
Cambridge has also responded to the open access policy review currently being conducted by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), issuing a joint statement in partnership with Cambridge University Libraries. The statement expresses concerns about the absence of any funding to support the UKRI’s requirement that all REF-submitted monographs be open access after REF 2021; it also highlights ‘a conflict between the need for sustainable journal publishing models that provide access to the final published article and affordability for research-intensive universities’ and requests ‘flexibility on details such as Creative Commons licenses and third party content’.
New website and community for AUP
The Association of University Presses has launched a new online community for its members, UP Commons, alongside the redesign of its public website. The new site includes a section promoting the value university presses offer to universities, scholars, and society at large, and a jobs board.
New journals for Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press has added three more titles to its portfolio of journals, taking its total to 48. Crime Fiction Studies, published on behalf of the International Crime Fiction Association, and Global Energy Law and Sustainability are both new titles, while Library & Information History, published on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals, was formerly produced by Taylor & Francis.
Pilot for Pluto
The London-based social sciences publisher Pluto Journals has announced a pilot to transform its entire portfolio of 21 journals titles to open access in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, using the Subscribe-to-Open model.
Buckingham in partnership with ScienceOpen
The University of Buckingham Press has partnered with ScienceOpen in a move which will see content from five of its journals – the Buckingham Journal of Education, the Journal of Prediction Markets, the Journal of Gambling and Business Economics, the Denning Law Journal, and the International Journal of Person Centered Medicine – form a new collection, the University of Buckingham Press Super Collection, on the latter’s discovery platform.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.