5/3/2023 0 Comments Bobok lucu![]() Our titles have been submitted for scrutiny as part of the UK REF assessment exercise and they are reviewed by academic publications including The Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education, Choice Review, Essays in Criticism, Modern Language Review, and many more. Based on these reports, our Board of Directors makes a final decision. QualityĪll our books are rigorously peer reviewed: first an author’s proposal is assessed internally by our Board of Directors and members of the Editorial Board and Advisory Panel, and then, if judged of sufficient quality, the full manuscript is sent for review by at least two experts in the relevant field. In total, we have received over 3 million book visits, and this is only from those sources we can measure: actual usage of our books will be far in excess of these figures. A monograph typically sells 200 copies over its entire lifetime, but our books are viewed an average of 400 times per title every month. Our titles are accessed by millions of people around the world. We believe that charging authors is an unsustainable and inequitable way to fund Open Access. We do not charge authors to publish with us. ![]() We are committed to making academic books freely available for everyone.Īll our books are available in high-quality Open Access editions (PDF, HTML and XML), and reasonably priced paperback, hardback and ebook editions (EPUB and MOBI), all created from the same master file and published on the same date with no embargo period. The press’s founders and Directors are researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as are several of our team. We are an independent, not-for-profit social enterprise, run by and for academics, based in Cambridge, UK. Our books mostly cover subjects in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In that time, our output has grown to over 170 titles, at a current rate of between 24-30 books per year. OBP has published award-winning Open Access books (including monographs, edited collections and textbooks) since 2008. We explain our business model in some detail to demonstrate that there are alternatives to the BPC approach, and that they can produce high-quality, Open Access academic books. Since we are an established OA press that does not charge BPCs, we decided it would be useful to lay out our own costs and revenue for the last financial year (1 October 2018 - 30 September 2019), to provide some of the numbers that are currently missing and to counter some of the prevailing assumptions about funding OA books. Therefore, if a BPC model cannot support Open Access for books in a fair and sustainable way, it isn’t Open Access that should be thrown out-it’s the BPC model. Open Access is much more effective at communicating knowledge than a non-OA system, as the current pandemic is starkly demonstrating (and as was obvious before to those without access to a well-stocked academic library, with the funds to pay for expensive monographs and to cover hefty journal subscription costs). Recent estimates have therefore tended to be drawn from the charges some well-known publishers levy to produce an OA book-but price is not the same as cost.Īs Elizabeth Gadd has recently pointed out, the purpose of research dissemination is not to prop up broken publishing systems. Such information is rarely made public, in part because commercial presses are reluctant to do so on the basis that it will put them at a competitive disadvantage. The debate is usually held on these terms because up-to-date, detailed information about how much it costs to publish an OA book, and the revenue streams that are available to meet these costs, is sorely lacking. We do not charge authors ‘Book Processing Charges’ (BPCs) to publish with us-quality is the only factor that determines whether or not we publish a book.īut many of the conversations about the financial viability of Open Access book publishing are predicated on a single business model-that of the BPC-and they assume there will be no revenue when a book is published OA. ![]() Our books are rigorously peer-reviewed, award-winning, innovative, and available in multiple Open Access editions (PDF, HTML and XML) as well as physical and ebook editions. ![]() One of the biggest objections to the plan is that it will be too expensive to fund the OA publication of academic books- some of the more breathless coverage has speculated that this policy might herald the end of the monograph as a viable format for scholarly work.Īt Open Book Publishers (OBP) we have published all our books Open Access since our founding in 2008-so we disagree. The cost of Open Access (OA) book publishing has been the topic of some discussion in the UK due to UKRI’s consultation on its Open Access policy, which proposes that all UKRI-funded research published in book or chapter form should be Open Access from 2024.
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