Skip to main content

Open Access policy

Our mission at the University of London Press is to ‘open up humanities research’, and a key element of this is our commitment to open access publishing for the majority of our new books.

The proven benefits of open access (OA) publishing in making important ideas available to a more diverse and global readership are particularly critical for humanities research, expanding our collective understanding of human cultures, societies, histories and languages. As passionate advocates for the humanities, we want the work we publish to have the widest possible audience globally and to open up debate. Open access publishing is crucial to this mission.

We support open access publication via the following three routes (see Funding model and charges for more detail):

  1. Diamond: The nature of our funding and mission means that we can publish the majority of our books programme – around 20 titles per year – without requiring authors to pay any fees. We will cover the full publication costs for books in our ‘core’ OA book series (see Open access book series for a current list of these series).
  2. Gold: Where authors of books publishing in our ‘core’ OA series have access to publication funding (for example, from grants or their institution), we do encourage authors to use this funding to support their book’s production costs. We also charge a Book Processing Charge (BPC) to publish books outside our core OA series which fit our humanities publishing programme but where we can’t fund the publishing costs ourselves. Our standard BPC is £6,000 plus VAT.
  3. Green: We are able to publish a small number of non-open access books where open access is not possible (for example, due to restrictions on use of third-party material) or where funding for Gold OA publication isn’t available. Authors of non-OA books may deposit their author accepted manuscript in an institutional repository after the book has been published for 12 months.

If you have any questions about our open access policy that aren’t covered on this page or in Information for authors, please do get in touch with Emma Gallon (Publisher) or Paula Kennedy (Head of Publishing).


Our ‘core’ OA book series which do not charge author fees and are currently open for submissions include:

We are actively developing our publishing programme and are adding new series to this list all the time.

Outside these ‘core’ OA series, we can also cover the publishing costs for a small number of books which directly relate to our mission to advance and open up humanities research. This might include books which advocate for the humanities, focus on how humanities research is essential in tackling contemporary challenges such as AI or the climate crisis, explore the future of humanities disciplines, or offer innovative models for publishing research, as examples. If you have a project which you think fits this brief, please get in touch with our Publisher, Emma Gallon.

All our open access books are published online and free to download in PDF format via our website and a variety of platforms immediately on publication. We also publish the books simultaneously in both hardback and paperback print formats for those readers and customers who still prefer print. Many of our books are also available as EPUB eBooks for sale via Kindle and other platforms. Please see individual book pages for links to purchase different formats.

Diamond OA

The majority of books in our publishing programme are published open access with no charge to authors. Our funding from Research England through the School of Advanced Study allows us to cover the costs of publishing open access books in a number of our ‘core’ book series. As these ‘core’ series push the humanities in new directions and further the mission of the School of Advanced Study in promoting humanities research, authors and editors are not charged a fee for publishing in these, regardless of their affiliation.

As part of the early discussions of your proposal with our editorial team, you will be advised on whether your proposal is being considered under our Diamond funded route.

Gold OA

Book Processing Charges

For our ‘core’ open access book series, we do not charge authors to publish with us. However, if authors publishing in those series do have funding available (from research grants or their university, for example), we encourage you to use this towards the costs of publishing your book with us. By helping to cover the costs of your own book, we are then able to publish more books from authors who don’t have access to funding.

Where funding is available, or for books which publish outside our ‘core’ OA series, we ask for payment of a Book Processing Charge (BPC) which is tied to the word-length of the project:

  • For books up to 100,000 words, the BPC is £6,000 plus VAT
  • For short-form (between 20-50,000 words), the BPC is £4,500 plus VAT

If your book is longer than 100,000 words, please get in touch with us to get an indicative BPC for your project. The BPC covers the publishing costs of the book, including copyediting, typesetting, proofs, cover design, printing, metadata management, printing, dissemination and OA platform fees.

We offer a discounted BPC for authors affiliated with our host institution (the School of Advanced Study, University of London) or any of the University of London’s Member Institutions whose book fits our publishing programme but publishes outside one of our ‘core’ OA book series. The discounted BPC in these cases is £4,500 plus VAT (a 25% discount).

If you’re unable to pay the BPC but have a proposal you feel would fit with our publishing programme, please get in touch with us.

Please note that all book proposals must receive two positive external peer reviews in order to be accepted for publication, regardless of whether funding is available to cover the Book Processing Charge. 
 
Chapter Processing Charges

If you are publishing a non-OA book with us but require a chapter to publish open access, we will charge you a Chapter Processing Charge (CPC). The fee is based on the percentage of the total word count of the final manuscript which the chapter constitutes.

As an example: if the chapter required to be OA is 6,000 words from a 100,000-word manuscript, the CPC would be 6% of our Book Processing Charge of £6,000 = £360 (plus VAT).

Green OA

Under our Green open access policy (self-archiving), authors are allowed to deposit their author accepted manuscript (AAM) in an institutional or subject repository. The AAM is defined here as the final manuscript following peer review and revision but before any copyediting or typesetting work has been carried out by us.

This policy applies to monographs, edited collections and individual book chapters, and the Green route applies to books published as traditional, closed-access publications. Please note that under our Green open access route:

  • an embargo period of 12 months from publication should be applied before archiving the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in a repository;
  • you should make clear that the deposited AAM is not the final published version. Please include citation information for the published book in the repository record, along with a link (ideally a DOI link) to the publication on the UoL Press website;
  • you may apply a Creative Commons licence to the AAM;
  • the AAM may not be uploaded to a commercial, for-profit platform.

Our embargo period is compliant with major funders’ OA policies, including UKRI. If your funder has a specific requirement which falls outside our policy, please do get in touch to discuss the deposit of your AAM in a repository or a potential waiver of our embargo policy.

Authors of books published immediately open access via the Diamond or Gold routes outlined above may archive the final published version (or Version of Record) in an institutional or non-commercial subject repository on publication.

Our open access publications are all published under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, which means that authors control their own copyright and determine how their work is used.

Our default licence is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial-NoDerivatives International 4.0). This licence allows others to download your work and share it with others in any medium or format as long as they credit your original publication, but it can’t be used commercially. It can be adapted (built upon, remixed, etc) but any changes must be indicated, and the modified material cannot be distributed.

If you are subject to a specific funders’ requirements which need a different CC licence or would like to publish under a different CC licence, we can agree to this upon request.

It’s preferable for any third-party material (e.g., images) to be shared in your book under the same CC licence as the rest of the book, but if the copyright holder doesn’t permit this then it’s possible for you to share the material under a different or more restrictive licence. Our guidance for authors has helpful advice on third-party permissions, particularly for OA books.

For non-open access books, authors generally also retain copyright and grant UoL Press an exclusive licence to publish the work in all print and digital formats.

Our open access books go through the same high-quality, rigorous processes as non-open access books. All our books are initially evaluated by our editorial team (and series editors or series advisory board members, where relevant). If a proposal fits with our publishing programme and we decide to proceed with it, it will be sent out for a minimum of two external peer reviews under a single-anonymised review process. If your proposal is positively reviewed and fits the programme, it will be assessed by our Publishing Committee who will then make a final decision on whether a contract is issued or not. Final manuscripts of contracted books are also sent for external peer review and – once accepted for publication – go through our usual copyediting, typesetting, cover design and production processes.

Learn more about our thorough peer review processes.

Once published, your open access book will be published in multiple print formats and the OA version will be made available. We partner with a range of third-party platforms to ensure our OA books benefit from wide dissemination, including JSTOR and OAPEN. OA books are also listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) as well as indexed in Clarivate’s Books Citation Index. 

Our OA books are also available on our instance of the Manifold open access publishing platform. This platform allows us to publish innovative enhanced ebooks which demonstrate the possibilities of open access publishing for humanities research (see Information – Open access for more information about how we’re using the Manifold platform in our publishing).

All books also receive the same marketing and sales efforts as non-OA books, including review copies to key journals, inclusion in our catalogues and promotion on our website, social media and other channels. 

We are happy to provide authors with updates on the downloads and usage of their open access books upon request. 

It’s crucial that all open access books have robust and transparent long-term preservation processes. Through our partnerships with the JSTOR and OAPEN platforms, all our open access books are preserved by Portico (ITHAKA’s non-profit digital preservation service).

If you are subject to a specific funder’s requirement for depositing your book in a particular repository, this is also possible – do let us know.

We believe that open access and open research play a vital role in supporting a positive research culture. Open research also supports researchers’ career development and upholding ethical and good research practices in the humanities – for example, through increasing transparency, fairness and breadth of access, reuse, idea-sharing, and opportunities for collaboration.

We also recognise the importance of undertaking and publishing research responsibly and in line with ethical and legal frameworks (see Peer review and publication ethics).

Best practice guidance for authors

  • We encourage all our authors to use ORCID iDs, if possible, and request these from authors as part of the proposal process.
  • We encourage authors to think carefully at the start of their project about what outputs and material it would be desirable to make available to others (and what would not be possible; open publication is just part of the research lifecycle).
  • We ask all authors of open access books to apply a Creative Commons licence to enable reuse of their work, and support them to understand their rights associated with the licence.
  • We ask authors to consider their use of third-party material in their open access books and ensure that written permissions are obtained from the copyright holders specifically for open access publication.
  • We encourage the open sharing of data linked to your work, where available and ethical/legal to do so. Useful guidance can be found on the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) website, particularly relating to ‘FAIR’ principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).
  • We can provide guidance to authors looking to bring open research methods into the writing and publication process, in creating ‘networked’ eBooks (involving iterative content creation, annotation tools or open peer review processes, for example).