Projects, partners and initiatives

We are very proud to be one of the founding presses involved in the creation of the new Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), which formally launches in autumn 2023. This group is a community of practice for publishing operations striving for open access who are based in institutions, from small and medium-sized university presses to individuals based within university libraries working on scholarly journals. The association offers a new infrastructure to support non-commercial open access publishing within the UK, creating a forum to share advice, information, resources, training and best practice. Our Head of Publishing, Paula Kennedy, is currently the Chair of the association.

Currently, the other presses, publishing operations and partners involved in OIPA include White Rose University Press, Scottish Universities Press, the University of Westminster Press, UCL Press, Goldsmiths Press, LSE Press, the University of Sussex Library, the University of Huddersfield Press and Jisc. Learn more about OIPA from this blog post that outlines the development and aims of the new association.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is one of the seven disciplinary research councils that form part of the UK’s national research funding agency, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). A number of our titles have been published open access thanks to funding received from the AHRC.

The Press is grateful to receive donations in support of our work in promoting the value and importance of humanities research, our experimental publishing models and our training programme. Donor support can enable us to publish additional open access titles, offer enhanced marketing support for our books, and support our work more broadly as part of the Open Institutional Publishing Association.

A donation from the Bodleian Library enabled the publication of Waterscapes: Reservoirs, Environment and Identity in Modern England and Wales, in our New Historical Perspectives series for Early Career Researchers.

We have partnered with Thoth, a metadata management and distribution platform built specifically for open access book publishers.

This partnership is to help us promote our open access titles, allowing for faster and more efficient content dissemination, richer metadata and an expanded distribution network, allowing the Press to offer improved visibility and discoverability for all of our open access books.

Thoth provides:

• Metadata management for books and chapters
• Automated distribution to various platforms
• Archiving and preservation of scholarly works
• DOI registration and management
• Open APIs for seamless integration with other platforms.

Thoth allows publishers to create, manage, and distribute high-quality metadata – including MARC21 and MARCXML records – which libraries can easily download and integrate into their catalogues, either directly from the Thoth Catalogue or via Thoth’s Export API. All records are released under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

We are pleased to be part of EvenUP, a collective of UK and Irish university presses that are committed to equality, diversity and inclusivity in our workplaces, in who we work with and in what we publish. The group is working collaboratively to share information resources and best practice for EDI across presses; use survey tools to collect demographic data to understand areas in which we can improve; create a programme of training and events; promote and demonstrate transparency and equal opportunity in recruitment and career progression; and raise awareness of career opportunities with groups that are currently underrepresented in scholarly publishing. 

On its launch, our Head of Publishing, Paula Kennedy, said:  

‘Recent years have shown more than ever that real change within publishing is needed to support greater equity and diversity within organisations and publishing practices alike. We look forward to participating in this collaboration with colleagues from other university presses, and these initial commitments are a welcome first step in our journey to facilitate change within academic publishing.’ 

Within EvenUP, we work with other members of the group who include Bristol University Press, Cambridge University Press, Cork University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Goldsmiths Press, Harvard University Press (UK office), Liverpool University Press, LSE Press, Manchester University Press, MIT University Press (UK office), Oxford University Press, Princeton University Pres (European office), Scottish Universities Press, University College Dublin Press, University College London Press, University of Wales Press, University of Westminster Press and Yale University Press (UK office).  

We are very proud to have been a participant in Jisc’s pilot Open Access Community Framework (OACF) in 2022, and to have successfully achieved our funding target through this scheme with support from 10 UK institutional libraries. This submission focused on our New Historical Perspectives series, which is aimed at early career historians and is published in partnership with the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research. The funding we received from the participating libraries is supporting us scaling up the series to meet author demand and improving the discoverability and profile of the series.  

The OACF was a new initiative launched in 2022 by Jisc, aimed at supporting a diverse scholarly communication ecosystem, in which UK higher education institutions can directly pledge to support open access publishing by smaller non-profit publishers. The University of London Press was one of only three initiatives to meet their funding target by the scheme’s closing date. Read more about the Jisc OACF funding we received in 2022.

We are so grateful to the following institutions for pledging funding during the first round of the scheme, who are helping us to publish additional authors and books in the series who will benefit from the excellent mentoring and support it offers first-time authors: 

• Cardiff University 
• University of Birmingham 
• University of Bristol
• University of Cambridge
• University of Exeter
• University of Nottingham 
• University of Sheffield 
• University of St Andrews
• University of Sussex
• University of York 

“The University of St Andrews is proud to support University of London Press to expand its unique and much lauded New Historical Perspectives open access monograph series. This series does not charge fees to authors, therefore it provides a valuable open access publishing opportunity for early career historians who may not have the financial backing to publish open access in other presses.” (Kyle Brady, Scholarly Communications Manager, University of St Andrews).

We have also recently had our new submission accepted to the second round of Jisc’s OACF in 2023, this time focused on helping us to grow our publishing programme in human rights and social justice. We are one of three successful publishers to have been accepted to the scheme, and institutions are able to pledge support for our submission until the end of December 2023 via Jisc’s Licensing Subscriptions Manager. For more information, this recording of a Jisc webinar run in June 2023 features Paula Kennedy, our Head of Publishing, outlining how OACF funding will support the publication of additional books in this area without author fees and enhanced marketing activity to help the books reach both academic and non-academic audiences likely to be interested in the research.  

We are very grateful to the following institutions who have already pledged funding for this second round of the Jisc OACF in 2023, who are supporting our publication of additional titles and enhanced promotion of books on human rights and social justice:  

• University of Sussex
• University of Sheffield
• University of York 
• Lancaster University
• University of Bristol
• University of Manchester

These kinds of new collaborations between smaller, non-commercial publishers and librarians are an important step in shaping new publishing futures for academic books, and we hope offer new models for other publishers to learn from. 

In recent years, we have had support through funding pledged through our partnership with Knowledge Unlatched (KU) to make a number of books available open access, particularly through their ‘KU Select’ scheme. KU uses a crowdfunding model to enable libraries to select titles submitted by publishers to be part of annual subject-based collections, and to pledge support to ‘unlatch’ these books and make them available open access without author fees. 

A selection of our titles are included in KU’s current pledging round.

Our inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)  means that our open access books are also promoted specifically to libraries in lower income countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America through Research4Life.

We are very supportive of Copim (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) and its successor project, Open Book Futures, both funded by Research England and Arcadia. These projects are transforming scholarly communications, particularly for open access books, and offering publishers important new models and infrastructure. Our participation in these projects includes involvement in the metadata work package (through our inclusion in the metadata management and dissemination platform, Thoth) and Copim’s work on archiving and preservation. Our Head of Publishing, Paula Kennedy, is also on the Advisory Board for Open Book Futures. We are also pleased to be included in the project’s Open Book Collective – see following section for more detail on this. Our work across different work packages affiliated to the Open Book Futures project is important to us, and a commitment to supporting new community-led models and infrastructures for open access publishing more broadly.

We are delighted to be a publisher member of the Open Book Collective (OBC), where libraries can support our work either as an individual publisher or in the ‘University Press’ package (along with Leuven University Press and the University of Westminster Press). The OBC is a charity working to deliver a diverse and sustainable future for open access books, reimagining their funding beyond Book Processing Charges (BPCs). Bringing together open access book publishers, open publishing service providers and scholarly libraries, the OBC is doing important work in supporting a more sustainable and equitable future for open access books based on collaboration and collective action. Library supporters involved pay a small subscription charge to support publishers or service providers (the combined ‘University Press’ package ranges between £1,700-£3,500 per annum as an example, depending on the size/ location of the supporting organisation).

We are very grateful to the libraries supporting us through the OBC, which currently includes the following institutions:

• KU Leuven, Belgium
• Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
• University of Groningen, Netherlands
• Tilburg University, Netherlands
• UiT the Arctic University of Norway Library, Norway
• Nord University Library, Norway
• University of Oslo, Norway
• Bath Spa University, UK
• University of Bristol, UK
• Cambridge University Library, UK
• University of Edinburgh, UK
• University of Exeter, UK
• University of Leicester, UK
• Liverpool John Moores University, UK
• Loughborough University, UK
• University of Manchester, UK
• Newcastle University, UK
• University of Nottingham, UK
• National Library of Scotland, UK
• University of Sussex, UK
• University of Sheffield, UK
• University of Southampton, UK
• Southampton Solent University, UK
• University of the Arts London, UK
• University College London, UK
• School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK
• Amherst College, USA
• University of Arizona, USA
• James Madison University, USA
• MIT Libraries, USA
• York University Libraries, Canada

We are an Associate Partner on the Museums and Industry: Long Histories of Collaboration project (2023–25) examining the industrial patronage of museums, which is being carried about by a consortium of museums, universities and collaborators across Spain, France, Norway and the UK led by the Science Museum Group. Our role as Associate Partner is to support the project research team with publishing training and workshops. The project is funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage and Global Change. Learn more about the Museums and Industry: Long Histories of Collaboration project.

In 2024, we were delighted to announce that our book Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London by Simon Newman (2022) had won the inaugural ACLS Open Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. The grant we received through this award is enabling us to support the open access publication of three new books in 2025–2027.  

Formed in 1919, ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good.

Arcadia is a philanthropic organisation that awards grants to support work in recording cultural heritage, conservation and restoration of nature and promotion of open access to knowledge.