Category Archives: Notes From The Editor

Small articles and pieces from OBP about Open Access and notable information surrounding the books we are publishing and their relevance to current matters.

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Women and Migration; a vital contribution to the narrative of migration

Zsofia Hesket https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0096

Migration has been intertwined with human life from its very beginnings. The nomadic spirit of our ancestors led them from Africa to Asia between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, and today, human beings populate all corners of the globe. Yet the impulse to leave behind one’s homeland can also be triggered by devastation, a familiar picture in recent decades. In June 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that a shocking 68.5 million had been ‘forcibly displaced’ from their homes since the Second World War. Global refugee numbers have reached nearly 25.4 million as a result of conflict in Rwanda, Kosovo, Somalia and Iraq, to name but a few. But while women make up almost half of these refugee numbers, only 4% of the UN’s inter-agency appeals have been targeted at women and girls. Their perspectives have remained notoriously neglected. OBP’s forthcoming Open Access title, Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, tries to rectify just that.

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OBP blogs on tour


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0093

We have recently contributed to two other blogs to talk about ScholarLed, the new OA consortium we have joined; and about the importance of Open Access publishing and what it can offer to authors. Catch up with those posts here!

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Further Reading


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0092

Photo by William on Unsplash

This blog post is part of a series for academics who want to find out more about Open Access. Click here for the other posts.

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Reputation, reputation, reputation – quality control and reward systems


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0091

Photo by Johnson Wang on Unsplash

In the past, Open Access publishing has been accused of being akin to vanity publishing or self-publishing, while the term ‘predatory publishing’ describes a phenomenon in which a publisher charges expensive fees for guaranteed publication while failing to provide peer review or even basic editing.[1]

Reputable Open Access publishers clearly advertise their quality-control systems. For example at OBP we emphasise our rigorous peer-review system, as well as the high standard of our editing and production work – and this is evident in our publications, which are easy to check precisely because they are Open Access. Meanwhile the well-established publishers who produce Open Access work, such as Cambridge University Press, do not throw their quality control out of the window when they publish books or articles on an Open Access basis.[2] Continue reading

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Copyright and licensing – what do I need to know?


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0090

Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash

When you create original work, you possess the copyright.[1] When you wish to publish that work, some publishers might ask you to sign the copyright over to them as a condition of publication, so that they can disseminate the work exclusively and therefore maximise its profitability. However, you do not have to agree to this – you can ask to retain copyright, or to transfer only a limited number of your rights to the publisher.

Pay attention to the contract the publisher is asking you to sign, make sure you understand it, and negotiate if you are unhappy with any of the terms. Be aware that signing away exclusive rights to the publisher might mean that you are not able to republish the work yourself in future, if for example you wish to republish a journal article as a chapter in a book. Continue reading

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Green, Gold, Diamond, Black – what does it all mean?


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0089

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

There’s a lot of jargon surrounding Open Access publication, and as with all jargon it can confuse and obfuscate. Here is a simple glossary: Continue reading

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APCs, BPCs, can I have some money please – who pays for OA?


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0088

Photo by Ramiro Mendes on Unsplash

This is one of the most important questions for authors: if the reader doesn’t pay, who does? BPCs (Book Processing Charges) and APCs (Article Processing Charges) are fees levied on authors, their institutions or their funding bodies to pay for Open Access publishing (also known as author-side fees). Continue reading

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What should I ask a publisher about Open Access?


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0087

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

There are many academic publishers who publish Open Access work, including some of the most well-known such as Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, The MIT Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, Elsevier, and so on.

There are also publishers whose entire publishing output is made available on an Open Access basis, such as ourselves, Open Humanities Press, UCL Press, punctum books, and many more. Continue reading

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An Academic’s Guide to Open Access


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0086

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

For Open Access Week 2018, we’ve put together a series of blog posts that cover the basics of Open Access for academic researchers. We hope they give you the tools to navigate this vital subject with confidence.

 

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Why OBP is not participating in KU Open Funding: and why libraries should understand the reasons.


https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0085

Knowledge Unlatched has recently announced the launch of a new platform for Open Access (OA) books – KU Open Funding (KUOF) – designed to:

  1. Facilitate payments from libraries/universities to Open Access publishers
  2. Provide a list of, and information on, OA publishers receiving institutional funding that researchers can use to identify and select their publisher

Firstly, it is worth noting that this service is designed to address  issues of importance for sustainable OA book publishing. If business models for Open Access book publishing involve any form of funding transfer from an institution (university/grant body etc.) to the publisher (and there are many different forms this may take), then there are potentially significant transaction costs for each institution (and publisher) in setting up and administering these payments (if there are U universities and P publishers – then there are U x P financial flows to set up and maintain). These costs can be significantly reduced if all the transactions flow through a central hub – or platform – allowing each university or press to maintain just a single connection with the platform, rather than lots of individual connections. This reduces the number of connections for each university or press to just one, and across the whole system the number of required connections falls from  U x P  to U + P.  In a world with lots of universities and lots of publishers, the potential savings are significant. Many such collective payment services already exist within the library community – although none focused entirely on OA books (e.g. JISC Collections in the UK provides a similar, but non-exclusive service for UK libraries wishing to pay subscription and other fees to publishers – including library membership fees to OBP). Continue reading
http://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/category/notesfromtheeditor/
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