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FAQs


First you need to submit a proposal, along with a sample chapter. This will then go through an initial editorial evaluation and, if a decision is made to proceed, your proposal will be reviewed anonymously by two external peer reviewers. If the reviews are positive, your proposal will be taken forward to our monthly Publishing Committee meeting for discussion. The outcome of this meeting will then be communicated to you – if successful, you will be offered a publishing contract, a submission date will be set, and you can start preparing your manuscript for submission. For more about the submissions process, please visit our submission page. 

We publish books in both paperback and hardback editions. Your book cover will be designed by a freelance designer in collaboration with you (usually we ask you to source an image for your cover, or to suggest ideas if there is an established series design in place to work with).  We will also publish a web-optimised PDF with linked references and a reflowable EPUB edition, the look of which will vary depending on the e-reader used. Our most recent books also include an interactive online edition where the text can be read directly in the browser and readers can also highlight or annotate text, interact with resources and engage in discussions. 

We can publish images in our books, and the number and type of illustrations will be agreed with you during the proposal process. We are only able to accept illustrations that are essential to include, and those that are for decorative purposes only are not permitted. It is the responsibility of the author to clear copyright permissions for third-party image use, including covering any reproduction and permission fees. 

Your book will be made available in a number of different ways, depending  on which formats we are publishing it in. 

Print editions of our books are distributed through our two distributors:  

  • Ingram Publisher Services (for orders from the UK and globally excluding North America) 
  • Chicago Distribution Centre (for orders from North America) 

Through our distributors, print editions of our books are sold through channels including bookshops such as Waterstones and Blackwells and particularly libraries. New books are published print-on-demand in both hardback and paperback, so copies are printed as orders come in and your book will never go out of print.  

Open access titles are available to download directly from our website via our open access publishing platform, Manifold, and other platforms which currently include as JSTOR and DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)/OAPEN.  

For non-open access books we publish, the number of copies we sell varies depending on a range of factors, including the topic, audience and subject area. 

For our open access books, which make up the majority of our books programme, we aim to ensure the book has maximum engagement, which we measure through downloads and digital access. On average, our books are downloaded c.9,000 times each, but this figure also varies title-by-title – some of our top downloaded books have been accessed over 70,000 times.  

Yes, you will. The number of copies that authors, editors and contributors will receive will be set out in the book contract. Further print copies can be purchased by authors, editors and contributors with an author discount of 30%.

Please visit our statistics page where you can find out how readers have engaged with your book via our website and our distribution partners. Our ebooks are distributed to JSTOR, OAPEN and DOAB, and the Open Research Library (ORL) and published via our website and our Manifold scholarly publishing platform. All these services provide us with engagement data, in different formats, which is processed by us on a quarterly basis. 

All COUNTER-compliant data (from JSTOR, OAPEN/DOAB and ORL) is processed into a table which is then presented via Tableau on our website for users to access. 

Currently, our data is not broken down by country although this information is supplied by some of our distribution partners. We are currently working on updating our workflow so that we can process country access data and include this in the data we can share with our authors and readers.  

Our open access books are enrolled in the Books at JSTOR programme, which works closely with Portico, a community-supported preservation archive that safeguards access to e-journals, e-books, and digital collections. Portico ensures that the content they preserve will remain accessible and usable for anyone to access in the future. Our open access books are also deposited in the OAPEN online library and Open Research Library (ORL), which are both also linked to long-term archiving via Portico. 

Our open access books are assigned a DOI via Crossref which links to the landing page for the book on our website (where you will find links to all the different forms available for your book). The DOI can be used when citing the book, which helps us track usage via Crossref. 

Yes, you will receive a report updating you on the sales and downloads (where relevant) of your book at intervals after the book has been published, as well as copies of any reviews or other publicity that the book might receive. 

The University of London Press is 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. We receive funding through SAS to support our work, along with some support for office space and central costs from the University of London. 

The Press supports SAS’s mission in a variety of ways (see About us for more information). 

Our publishing programme is also supported by a small amount of income from print sales of our books and other funding schemes such as Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework and the Knowledge Unlatched scheme. For  more information about how we’re funded, see Funding and governance. 

We primarily publish academic books in the form of monographs, edited collections and short-form (20–50k words) books both in print and digital formats, depending on the requirements of a project. The publishing model and formats are decided on a project-by-project basis at contract stage but the majority of our new books (and all of our open access titles) publish in both hardback and paperback formats, alongside PDF and EPUB versions.

We also publish a selection of innovative, enhanced digital editions on our instance of the open access platform, Manifold, that are freely available to read online. Learn more about our enhanced editions.

We participate in several funding projects, including Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework and Knowledge Unlatched, where institutional libraries can directly support specific areas of our publishing programme.

We are also able to receive donations in support of our work and particular areas of our publishing programme. We are happy to work with potential supporters to ensure that any donations are spent on specific activity which may be a priority for the supporter, where possible (for example, a particular book series). For more information on this and detail on how to get in touch to make a donation, please see Funding and governance.

Please contact uolp.reviews@sas.ac.uk to request a review copy of the book you would like to review with more details. We can provide review copies in either physical or ebook form.  

The University of London Press is now predominantly an open access publisher, but we do also ensure that there is room in our publishing programme for projects which may not be suitable for open access publication. Open access is a core part of our mission, and we aim to publish as many books open access as we can. Approximately 70% of our current books programme is published as immediate open access without author charges, thanks to our funding via the School of Advanced Study and Research England, and we are striving to increase this figure in the years to come through our participation in a range of funding pilot schemes. 

In most cases, no. Our funding through SAS enables us to cover the publishing costs of between 20-25 open access books in our ‘core’ book series each year without any cost to authors.

Where authors of books publishing in these series do have access to publication funding (for example, from grants or their institution), we encourage them to use this funding to cover their book’s production costs with us, which then enables us to publish additional books from authors who don’t have funding. We also charge a Book Processing Charge (BPC) to publish books outside our ‘core’ open access series – see our open access policy for more information. 

Where open access publication is not possible or where funding for publication isn’t available, we do offer a Green route to open access after the book has been published for 12 months. For more information, please see Funding models and charges on our open access policy page.  

We publish primarily across the humanities disciplines, including History, Law, Literary Studies, Languages and Classics, amongst others. A full list of the subjects we publish in can be found on our website. 

No, we also welcome proposals from academics and practitioners that are not affiliated with the University of London. Our book series are open to authors from any institution and region.  

Your proposal and sample chapter will initially be evaluated by the Press’s editorial team in consultation with series editors, where relevant. If the decision is made to proceed with the proposal, it will then be formally peer-reviewed (single-anonymised). Please see our full peer review policy for more information. 

This depends on a few different factors but for most books our production process is 6–7 months, following a positive peer review and acceptance of your final submitted manuscript.  Our production process includes copyediting, typesetting and proofreading, printing and digital file production, and finally distribution.