University of Westminster Press (UWP) is a non-profit, open access, institutionally-based publisher of peer reviewed arts, humanities and social science research. Founded in 2015, we publish around seven books per year including monographs, edited collections, shortform books, textbooks, and policy briefs and reports. We also publish six diamond open access journals.
We have particular strengths in media and communications studies and also publish in law, geography, political science, cultural studies and other subject areas. Via our membership of OBC we aim to build our books programme to publish 10 books per year in specific areas to offer scholars more opportunities to publish utilising a values-led diamond open access model.
As one of the first in a new breed of open university presses, and as the 3rd largest publisher of this type in the UK, UWP is proud to be part of a new movement in scholarly publishing that is community led and mission driven, providing an alternative to legacy publishing models. UWP champions a diamond open access model where research is both free to read and free to publish, ensuring an equitable, inclusive and accessible approach. Our books and journals have a broad global reach, accessed everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and in 2023 they surpassed three million views and downloads of their publications.
Mission and Values
UWP’s mission is to serve our home institution by promoting Westminster’s research strengths and priorities internationally, amplify our unique contribution to solving global challenges and addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and promote an accessible, equitable and inclusive approach to scholarly publishing and open access, providing a values-driven, community-led alternative to outdated, profit-driven publishing models.
As founding members of the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), UWP seeks to disrupt a scholarly communications landscape dominated by commercial interests, sharing the ethos and values ofour home institution with our focus on serving knowledge, not shareholders. We strive for a publishing ecosystem that works in collaboration with the academic community, putting the research endeavour, notprofits, first.
To achieve this we:
- Enforce the highest standards of peer review with a three-step process that ensures assessmentat proposal and typescript stage and is in line with the AUPresses Guidelines
- Aim to build a business model that allows us to offer fee free publishing to all our authors, allowing us to champion bibliodiversity and an accessible, equitable and inclusive publishing ecosystem
- Are not for profit and committed to transparency in our ways of working, including regarding costs of open access publishing
- Commit to working with open publishing service providers and partners that share our mission and values
- Allow authors to retain copyright in their work and publish using creative commons licences
- Commit to mutual support, collaboration and knowledge sharing across the wider community-led OA publishing community
- Are signatories to Even UP, a university press initiative for equality, diversity and inclusion in publishing
Governance
UWP sits within the University’s Research Environment and Scholarly Communications Team and is a key component of the University’s open research environment. This team reports into the Research andKnowledge Exchange Office (RKEO), while maintaining close connections with the University’s Library and Archives Service, from where UWP was established. This dual reporting line allows the Press to draw on the expertise of not only the library but other areas including impact, ethics and integrity, and researcher development.
UWP is managed by one Press Manager, managing day to day running of the Press, who works as part of a Management Team comprising the Research Environment and Scholarly Communications TeamLead and the Chair of the UWP Editorial Board. This team oversees strategic and operational activity.The Editorial Board is comprised of University of Westminster scholars, sitting for a three-year term, alongside ex officio representatives from the RKEO and the Library and Archives Service. The current Editorial Board can be viewed here. They are responsible for final assessment of all new project proposals post-peer review, for setting and maintaining high quality control standards for Presspublications and for monitoring strategic and operational targets.
Future Plans
With funding via OBC we plan to support publications in two new series: Critical Studies in (In)Justice and Social Change and Westminster Studies in Urban Experiences. We will also use funding to continue publishing in our Critical Digital and Social Media Studies series and to further develop our existing Cultural China series. We aim to build a book programme that publishes 10 books per year across these series.
Our new series in Critical Studies in Social Justice, edited by Professor Roza Tsagarousianou and Dr Petros Karatsareas, will provide a forum for theoretical, empirical, historical and experimental analysis ofissues related to (in)justice and social change. The series challenges and expands prevailing understandings of justice that equate it to formal equality and recognition of cultural, ethnic or religious differences. While recognizing the importance of the politics of recognition, this series will broaden the scope of the debate to questions of structural and institutional inequalities. Scholarship from across the social sciences will contribute to debates on the meaning and practice of justice to highlight the depth and systematic basis of inequality, calling attention to relations and processes of exploitation, marginalisation and normalisation that reproduce power and keep individuals and communities in subordinate positions. Areas we will commission in include the politics of cultural and positional difference; the meaning and practice of voice and the effects of voicelessness; access to resources and institutional (in)justice; borders, migration and (in)justice; and environmental justice.
Our new series on urban experiences, edited by Professor Andrew Smith, will draw on geography, leisurestudies, critical events studies, tourism studies and urban studies to explore urban tourism and the role of events as tools for the regeneration and revitalization of cities, and the way events affect public space. This series will extend UWP’s growing reputation in this area via previous publications – Destination London, Festivals and the City and the forthcoming title Tourism and the Metropolis.
Our existing series, Critical Digital and Social Media Studies (CDSMS), edited by Professor Christian Fuchs, is UWP’s flagship series, well established in its field with a strong reputation. The series exploreshow power structures, digital capitalism, ideology and social struggles shape and are shaped by socialmedia. Books have focused on AI, digital disengagement, Big Data, platform capitalism, the digital commons and on theoretical approaches to new media forms. Titles in the series have been widely reviewed, and have won and been shortlisted for academic book prizes.
The Cultural China series publishes in association with the Contemporary China Centre (CCC) at the University of Westminster, and is edited by Professor Gerda Wielander. Established in 2009, the CCC focuses on Chinese cultural studies, engaging with Chinese language,cultural practice and production and its critical analyses both within China and the wider Sinophone world. This focus fills a gap in a field that tends to be dominated by social sciences perspectives via macro geo-political and economic concerns, thus diversifying, complicating and furthering understandings of contemporary China. UWP has published two volumes in the Cultural China series to date and with further funding we will adapt and extend the series to become a ‘home’ for Chinese cultural studies more broadly.
With funding from OBC we will commission publications for these series internationally and ensure books are discoverable and accessible globally. We will commission early career researchers alongside established scholars in the field, as well as from groups underrepresented in publishing. We will publish cutting-edge research in these fields alongside a commitment to epistemic diversity and experimentation in book publishing formats.
