More Information 

Founded in 2018 we have published 16 books to date, alongside 5 fully diamond open access journals. We have ambitious growth plans, aiming to publish 25 books a year by 2030. In our start up phase we have achieved notable successes:

• How Africa Trades won the Business Council of Africa’s Business Book of the Year 2024.
• Our textbook, Advanced Macroeconomics, has been accessed over 68,000 times.
• Our ability to draw on the convening power of LSE helps our publications reach a wide audience – our 2023 launch event for How Did Britain Come to This? has been streamed 229,000 times and is the most watched video on LSE Live. 
• We have acquired two prestigious book series: the Royal Geographical Society’s monograph series, previously published by Wiley, and the LSE Monographs in Social Anthropology series. Originally founded in the 1940s, this series was most recently published by Routledge, but has now returned back to its founding institution. Both series flipped to an open access model in moving to LSE Press.

Mission and Values

LSE Press’s mission is to be a publisher of choice for the global social science academic community, publishing the best social science research from around the world for the benefit of society. We are a non-profit, open access publisher and view open publishing as a powerful means of democratising knowledge and countering misinformation, fake news and undefended opinion. Our values are:

• Excellence and quality: a rigorous peer review process, overseen by our Editorial Board, ensures our publications meet the highest quality standards.  Excellence and quality also informs our approach to the production and design of our publications.
• Equity, diversity and inclusion: we are members of the Even UP collective, a group of UK and Irish university presses working together on EDI initiatives, and are committed to creating a fairer publishing ecosystem.
• Care and expertise: we put a high value on author care and our professional approach ensures an outstanding publishing experience from commissioning to production to marketing. 
• Collaboration: we are founding members of the Open Institutional Publishing Association, a group furthering the cause of non-profit institutionally based publishing, and look to play an active part in the wider open publishing community. We foster collaborative working relationships with authors and editors.  
• Transparency: we support transparency in open access business models.  
• Research as a public good: we value research as a public good that should be made freely accessible to as broad a range of readers as possible across the globe. 

Governance

LSE Press is based within the Library at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Press’s Managing Director is Library Director, Niamh Tumelty, who reports into the LSE Research Committee. The Press’s Chair, Professor Dame Sarah Worthington, oversees the commissioning strategy for the Press and the Editorial Board. The Board is comprised of LSE scholars who are responsible for making final publishing decisions on all proposals under consideration. Philippa Grand, Head of Publishing, oversees day to day operations and manages the Press team, Alice Parks (Managing Editor) and Elinor Potts (Communications Coordinator). 

Future Plans

LSE Press has ambitious plans for growth, aiming to publish 25 books per year by 2030 to establish ourselves as a publisher of choice for the global social science research community. Our book publishing programme will comprise of serious social science research that has the potential to influence academic debate, public policy and the broader conversation, drawing on the benefits of open access to enable impactful publication.

OBC funding will allow us to accelerate our growth plans and sustainably build LSE Press so that we are able to offer open access publication without author facing fees to as broad a range of our authors as possible. It will allow us to put in place a quality-driven publishing experience for authors from commissioning, through to production and design, and marketing and publicity.  Our hybrid business model will also draw on institutional and research grant funding to establish LSE Press as a leading open access publisher at the forefront of new developments in digital publishing.