The theme of Open Access Week this year is ‘Community over Commercialisation’. As a non-profit, predominantly open access university press, a commitment to community over commercialisation is at the heart of how we operate.
We are an integral part of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) at the University of London, which receives special funding from Research England to promote and facilitate humanities research. Our funding through SAS means that we have a unique remit in service to arts and humanities disciplines and communities more broadly. Part of that remit is to publish new publications which offer experimental models of open access (OA), to help humanities researchers to realise the benefits which OA publishing can offer. We also work closely with a variety of learned societies and partners within the HE, cultural and publishing sectors, and offer a series of free, online publishing-related training sessions aimed at helping humanities researchers of all career stages, including one on OA specifically.
This week we’re shining a spotlight on some of these partners and activities. We hope that this will be a helpful contribution to sector discussions about the challenges and opportunities relating to open research and new publishing and funding models, as well as a celebration of our collaborators and achievements! So for Open Access Week 2023, we’d like to share details of some of our publishing partnerships.
We’re proud to have a long-established relationship with the Royal Historical Society, our publishing partner for the New Historical Perspectivesseries, which is also published in association with the Institute of Historical Research. The NHP series is an open access book series for early career scholars, within ten years of their doctorate. Extensive support and feedback for the authors, many of whom are writing their first monograph, is provided, with each author receiving substantial reports from peer reviewers and series editors. They are each assigned a contact and ‘mentor’ from the editorial board, and take part in an Author Workshop to discuss and develop the near-complete book with invited specialists before submission for publication. Proposals are encouraged relating to all historical periods and subjects, meaning that the series covers a wide range of topics, from anti-communism to slavery, from poverty to poetry. If you’re interested in what it was like to give birth in the eighteenth century, or to find out more about the royal family and its relationship with mass media, these books are all available to read for free.
A selection of recent titles in the New Historical Perspectives series:
The supportive nature of the publishing process for the series, its broad scope, and the high quality of its published research, has resulted in positive testimonials from authors, award nominations, and generous support from a number of libraries who were given the opportunity to pledge funding to the series through Jisc’s Oopen Access Community Framework pilot project in 2022. This funding is being used to support the scaling up of the series over the next three years, so that we can meet the demand from authors wishing to publish within it. You can read more about the series here.
We also have a number of successful series with some of the other world-renowned humanities Institutes within SAS, including the long-running BICS series with the Institute of Classical Studies. At the other end of the spectrum, the brand new Reimagining Law and Justice series, published in association with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, launched earlier this year with its first open access title, Law, Humanities and the COVID Crisis. Other series that we are actively commissioning in at the moment include the Critical Human Rights Studies series with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (which libraries can support through our current submission in Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework funding scheme). Our community of publishing partners are an integral part of our publishing strategy, and provide much-appreciated support and input throughout the publishing process.
Read more about all our series here – for a full list of our publishing partners, see here. And look out for our next post celebrating open access week!
The University of London Press is supported by the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
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