Academic Publishing – August 2022
Oxford University Press issues annual report
Oxford University Press has issued its annual report for the financial year 2021-22. Overall, profits were up by more than half, from £56.1m to £93.6m, on a slightly increased turnover (up from £754.5m in 2021 to £781.3m in 2022). The Academic division saw growth of 1.7%, with highlights including 5% growth in income from Journals, and reaching the milestone of 100,000 published open access articles. Almost 1,800 new books were published, and new read-and-publish deals were agreed in Australia and New Zealand, Italy, the UK, the US, Sweden, Spain, Cyprus, Croatia, and Lithuania.
ALPSP announces seven-strong shortlist for 2022 Innovation award
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has announced this year’s shortlist for its Innovation in Publishing award. The seven finalists are Charlesworth Gateway – the Paper Status Notification Service from the Charlesworth Group; GigaByte, a rapid-publication journal published by GigaScience Press; Hum, a Customer Data Platform company from Silverchair; Case Genie, the AI-informed case law tool from ICLR and 67 Bricks; Impact Services from Emerald Publishing; the Joint Commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing, initiated and facilitated by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Review Commons peer review platform from EMBO and ASAPbio. The award winner will be announced at the ALPSP Conference 2022, held in Manchester UK from 14-16 September.
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Taylor & Francis wins accessibility certification
Taylor & Francis, who recently appointed Alex Robinson as Chief Commercial Officer, has achieved accessibility certification for its books by Benetech. The independent non-profit organisation evaluated a range of its new titles for more than one hundred accessibility features over an eight-month period before awarding the publisher the ‘Global Certified Accessible’ designation and a ‘Benetech Born Accessible’ score of 99%.
Taylor & Francis subsidiary Routledge has meanwhile announced a new partnership with the British Psychological Society (BPS) which will see at least six book series launched via a new joint book programme. More than ten books will be published each year, while BPS members will be entitled to discounts on all Routledge titles.
De Gruyter enters two new partnership agreements
De Gruyter has announced a new ebook distribution agreement with the independent family-run humanities and social sciences publisher Berghahn Books. More than two thousand of Berghahn’s frontlist, backlist, and archive titles will be hosted and distributed worldwide by De Gruyter; a fifth of its frontlist will be available exclusively and DRM-free this way. Libraries will also be able to purchase the publisher’s entire frontlist collection with multi-user access as part of De Gruyter’s University Press Library (UPL) offering, originally launched in 2014 and now twenty publishers strong.
De Gruyter has also signed a Purchase to Open agreement with Jisc Collections which will see the publication of up to thirty open access ebooks in three subject packages: Business & Economics, Classical Studies, and Linguistics. Publication costs will be crowdfunded by participating libraries, which will pay a single fee for unlimited access to the titles in each collection: if the target is met, titles will flip to open access on publication; if not, then participating libraries will still retain perpetual access to the collections they signed up for. The deadline for signing up is the end of this month.
All change at the Association of University Presses
Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press and associate university librarian for publishing at Michigan, has assumed the presidency of the Association of University Presses (AUP) for 2022-23; he succeeds Lisa Bayer, director of the University of Georgia Press. Also elected at the Association’s Annual Business Meeting were Jane Bunker, director of Cornell University Press, as President-Elect; Amy Schultz, director of finance and operations at Stanford University Press, as Treasurer; Alexandria Leonard, senior operations analyst at Princeton University Press, as Treasurer-elect. Former Treasurer Mike W. Bieker, director of the University of Arkansas Press, will serve as a member-at-large, in which role he will be joined by Rachael Levay, editor-in-chief at the University Press of Colorado, and Wendy Queen, director of Project MUSE at Johns Hopkins University Press.
The Association of University Presses has also issued a report on the cost of open access monograph publication, as part of a pilot project – TOME (Toward an Open Monograph System) – developed in partnership with the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs, developed by researchers Nancy Maron and Kim Schmelzinger, studied the costs incurred by fifteen university presses in publishing 57 titles via the programme; the report forms the first part of a more comprehensive examination of the initiative, now in its fifth and final year.
Further success for the Open Library of the Humanities
Four institutions from the Finnish FinELib consortium – Abo Akademi University, the University of Eastern Finland, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Jyväskylä – have signed up to the Open Library of the Humanities’ library partnership subsidy model. Two articles published in OLH journals have also won awards: Dr Amy Butt won the 2022 Science Fiction Research Association Innovative Research Award for ‘The Present as Past: Science Fiction and the Museum’, published in the OLH eponymous flagship journal, while Professor Jason Camlot won the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Donald Gray Prize for best Victorian Studies essay for his article ‘Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts’, published in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Nineteenth Century.
In brief
Technology from SAGE, the publisher’s workflow and access solutions division, has acquired the award-winning Sciwheel tool that enables library users to discover, read, annotate, write, and share research. The tool, which includes browser extension and plug-ins for Google Docs and Microsoft Word as well as a web application, will be integrated with SAGE’s Lean Library as part of a comprehensive academic workflow tool.
Wiley, which last month appointed Dr. Brian O’Harold Hemphill to its board of directors, is extending the use of the Oable open access workflow management solution developed by Knowledge Unlatched, which it acquired last year. The solution will initially be rolled out its to 34 of its customers before more than two thousand existing Wiley OA customers are migrated onto it by the end of the year.
Liverpool University Press has announced the launch of a new book series: Playwriting and the Contemporary: Critical Collaborations. Commissioning editor Christabel Scaife will be working with series editors at Loughborough, Lincoln, Greenwich, and Royal Holloway on a series intended to increase the press’s coverage of theatre and performance in its catalogue.
Emerald Publishing has signed the Menopause Workplace Pledge, committing it to create a supportive and understanding workplace for employees experiencing the menopause.
Alastair Horne is a lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling.
Alastair writes our STM Publishing and our Academic Publishing Newsletters.