Strong showing from scholarly sector on IPA shortlists
Scholarly publishers are well represented on the shortlists for this year’s Independent Publishing Awards, run by the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG). The four-strong list for the PLS Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year brings together Bloomsbury’s Academic and Professional Division, who took home both this award and the overall Independent Publisher of the Year trophy in 2013, Bristol University Press, Class Publishing, and Edward Elgar, winners in both 2014 and 2017.
The scholarly sector features strongly on the shortlist for the Alison Morrison Diversity Award too. Emerald Publishing, last year’s Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year, figures alongside SAGE and Princeton University Press, making their debut this year. Two academic publishers are shortlisted for other awards: Kogan Page for the IPG Marketing Award and Cambridge University Press for the IPG Sustainability Award, which it took home last year when the award was presented for the first time.
The IPG Awards Lunch will take place on Tuesday 21 September at the OXO Tower Brasserie in London.
Liverpool has Something for Beatles fans
Liverpool University Press is launching The Journal of Beatles Studies, a new open access journal that will serve as hub for research, discourse, and debate about the Beatles, with an emphasis on new ideas and emerging perspectives. The first issue of the biannual title will be published in September 2022.
Liverpool has also announced that it is offering a ‘subscribe to open’ transformative OA agreement for 2022 for its journals Town Planning Review (TPR) and International Development Planning Review. Institutions renewing their subscriptions will receive exclusive gated access to all previous issues of both journals in addition to supporting open access for current content.
Open access monograph initiatives
ScienceOpen has joined with Longleaf Services to provide metadata and promotional services for the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP), an open access project funded by the Mellon Foundation that aims to provide a model for open academic book publishing. Working with university presses, Longleaf publishes open digital editions of history titles; the metadata for these titles will now appear as a featured collection on ScienceOpen and be discoverable via its advanced search engine.
The MIT Press and the Big Ten Academic Alliance have announced a Direct to Open three-year collective action agreement that will provide access for all fifteen of the alliance’s member libraries to an archive of gated titles and discounts on the Press’s trade titles, while also helping to support open access publication for all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections from 2022.
Bristol introduces new journal
Bristol University Press is launching a new journal in 2022. Affiliated with the European Sociological Association’s Research Network on Sociology of Consumption (ESA RN05), the Sustainable Consumption Research & Action Initiative (SCORAI) Europe, and the British Sociological Association’s Consumption Study Group, Consumption and Society aims to advance the theoretical and empirical understanding of consumption as a societal phenomenon.
In brief
Edinburgh University Press has become a full member of the Association of University Presses.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.