At the University of London Press (UoL Press), our cutting-edge humanities programme is based on a century of publishing experience and a commitment to supporting humanities research and researchers. We are a non-profit, predominantly open access university press and offer authors a friendly, professional and collaborative publishing experience.
As an integral part of the School of Advanced Study, a national centre for the humanities in the UK, we have a unique remit in service of the arts and humanities more broadly. We do this in several important ways relating to publishing and impact: through publishing work which opens up new research agendas, through offering new models and space for experimentation in open access humanities publishing, through the free publishing-related training we offer for researchers, and through advocating for humanities disciplines and researchers in discussions around open research and academic publishing.
We aim to publish between 20-25 new books each year across humanities disciplines, including History, Literature, Languages and Cultures, Classical Studies, Law and Art History, and we will be expanding our programme into areas such as digital cultural heritage over the next few years. We publish monographs, edited collections and short-form books (20-50k words) and are developing new book series which push the humanities in new directions. Our books have won and been shortlisted for a number of prestigious prizes, and are rigorously peer-reviewed to ensure high quality.
Our new books are published in multiple formats across print and ebook editions, and our open access titles are published online and free to download in PDF format via our website. This includes some books on our new instance of the Manifold interactive publishing platform, which offers enhanced functionality for readers (annotations, highlights, sharing) and for authors (for example, linking to source material, maps and images, videos and blogs alongside the text). Most of our books and series are published in open access, primarily thanks to our support from the School of Advanced Study. Our open access policy explains more about this and outlines the options available to authors we work with.
Mission and Values
Our mission at the University of London Press is to open up humanities research. We are a non-profit and predominantly open access publishing partner for researchers and institutions and passionate advocates for the humanities.
Collaboration is one of our core values (see below), and we put this into practice by participating in a range of community-led projects. These include helping to develop the new Open Institutional Publishing Association (a new network of institutionally-affiliated publishing operations in the UK), participating in EvenUp (a collective of UK/ Irish university presses working together on a range of EDI initatives) and participating in Jisc’s pilot Open Access Community Framework scheme.
These are our values at UoL Press:
- We are passionate advocates for the humanities - We are committed to supporting humanities disciplines and researchers, publishing work that highlights the importance of humanities research and fosters debate.
- We are approachable and flexible collaborators - Our authors and publishing partners value our supportive ways of working, and our ability to be adaptable when meeting the specific needs of humanities disciplines in publishing.
- We are expert and experienced publishing professionals - Our team’s in-depth knowledge, experience in and understanding of academia, research cultures and the wider publishing landscape enables us to work efficiently and professionally to add value throughout the publishing process.
- We are committed to responsible open research - We aim to realise the benefits of open access for humanities disciplines and their particular requirements in relation to responsible open research. We also work hard to ensure global access to our publishing programme.
- We are rigorous and transparent - Our open and ambitious approach to our publishing programme and processes ensures quality and author satisfaction, and we’re committed to supporting the publication of high-quality, rigorously peer-reviewed new work.
Governance
A Publishing Committee, made up of publishing, library and academic staff, is responsible for making final publishing decisions on proposals submitted to the Press following successful peer review. We are also establishing a refreshed Advisory Board, who will oversee the Press’s strategic direction, policies, finances and operations. Individual book series are usually established with a dedicated series Editorial Board who assist with the evaluation, peer review and commissioning of new proposals for the series. Day-to-day operations are overseen by Paula Kennedy, our Head of Publishing. More information on our funding and governance can be found here.
Future Plans
Our new publishing strategy remains focused on the humanities, with new series being developed in areas including digital cultural heritage, history and policy, and law and social justice. We are also commissioning new books which advocate for the importance of the humanities for contemporary global challenges, and enhanced open access publications which showcase the possibilities for humanities research across different disciplines.
OBC funding will be used to allow UoL Press to build a more sustainable OA books programme, providing us with a more stable income stream which we can use to support a consistent programme of OA books. It will reduce our reliance on institutional funding (which varies year-on-year making it difficult to plan ahead) and mitigate the ongoing drop in print sales without needing to charge authors to publish with us. We also hope that OBC funding will support us in extending the publishing training programme we run as part of our wider community-engagement activity, and improve the accessibility of our open access titles.
