Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

academic book Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally pub ...

publisher based in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. It is a non-profit

social enterprise A social enterprise is an organization that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in financial, social and environmental well-being. This may include maximizing social impact alongside profits for co-owners. Social enterprises ca ...

and

community interest company A community interest company (CIC, colloquially pronounced "kick") is a type of company introduced by the United Kingdom government in 2005 under the Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Enterprise) Act 2004, designed for social ente ...

(CIC) that promotes open access for academic

monographs A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject. In library cataloging, ''monograph ...

, edited collections, critical editions and textbooks in the

Humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...

Social Sciences Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soci ...

Mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

. All OBP books are

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

. All OBP titles are

, and are available in free editions in

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

formats on the publisher's website, and a number of platforms including

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...

Worldreader Worldreader is a 501(c)(3) global nonprofit organization that provides people in the developing world with free access to a library of digital books via e-readers and mobile phones. Since 2010, over 13.3 million people across 62 countries have re ...

OpenEdition OpenEdition may refer to: * OpenEdition MVS, the original name of UNIX System Services * OpenEdition Shell and Utilities Feature for VM/ESA, the original name of z/VM OpenExtensions Shell and Utilities * OpenEdition.org, a scholarly Web port ...

DOAB ''Doab'' () is a term used in South Asia Quote: "Originally and chiefly in South Asia: (the name of) a strip or narrow tract of land between two rivers; spec. (with) the area between the rivers Ganges and Jumna in northern India." for the tract ...

The European Library The European Library is an Internet service that allows access to the resources of 49 European national libraries and an increasing number of research libraries. Searching is free and delivers metadata records as well as digital objects, mostly ...

and

Europeana Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...

. Some editions are hosted on

Wikiversity Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...

in socially editable format, e.g. ''In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography'' by Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015). Readers in developing countries can access OBP titles using

e-readers An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

and 2G mobile phones via

. Open Book Publishers is a partner in the

COPIM COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is an international project funded by Research England and Arcadia Fund. Following the principle of 'Scaling Small', the project aims to build not-for-profit community-owned, ...

project, building not-for-profit community-owned, open infrastructures to enable

open access book An open-access monograph is a scholarly monograph which is made openly available online with open license. Concept Open access is when academic research is made freely available online for anyone to read and re-use. As with open access journals, th ...

publishing to prosper. OBP is a founder member o
ScholarLed
a collective of not-for-profit, academic-led, open access book publishers. It is also a founder and co-ordinator of th
Open Access Books Network
a free and open network for anyone interested in open access books.

History

Open Book Publishers was founded in 2008 by

Rupert Gatti Rupert may refer to: People * Rupert (name), various people known by the given name or surname "Rupert" Places Canada *Rupert, Quebec, a village *Rupert Bay, a large bay located on the south-east shore of James Bay *Rupert River, Quebec * Rupert ...

and

Alessandra Tosi Alessandra is a female given name of Italian origin, meaning ''defender of men''. It is the Italian form of the female given name Alexandra and the female form of the male given name Alessandro. Alessandra may refer to: * Alessandra Ambrosio (bo ...

, both academics from the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

William St Clair William Linn St Clair, (7 December 1937 – 30 June 2021) was a British historian, senior research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and author. Biography William St Clair received ...

joined OBP in 2009 and became the chairman of the board of directors, a role he held until his death in 2021. OBP is now the biggest independent open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK. By the autumn of 2021, it had 230 books in its catalogue, all of which are free to read online. With

print on demand Print on demand (POD) is a printing technology and business process in which book copies (or other documents, packaging or materials) are not printed until the company receives an order, allowing prints of single or small quantities. While oth ...

technology OBP titles are also available in

paperback A paperback (softcover, softback) book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with adhesive, glue rather than stitch (textile arts), stitches or Staple (fastener), staples. In contrast, hardcover (hardback) book ...

and

hardback A hardcover, hard cover, or hardback (also known as hardbound, and sometimes as case-bound) book is one bound with rigid protective covers (typically of binder's board or heavy paperboard covered with buckram or other cloth, heavy paper, or occa ...

editions. Some of their titles experiment with innovative formats, e.g. books drawn from online databases, such as ''A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law'' by Inger Larsson, Ulrika Djärv, Jeffrey Love, Christine Peel, and Erik Simensen (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), or embedded audio or video content, such as ''Denis Diderot 'Rameau's Nephew' – 'Le Neveu de Rameau': A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition'', edited by Marianne Hobson, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016), which incorporates musical pieces recorded for publication in the book into the body of the text. OBP organized a campaign to republish an out-of-print book by Ruth Finnegan through the crowd source funding platform ''Unglue.it''.

Business model

open access monograph An open-access monograph is a scholarly monograph which is made openly available online with open license. Concept Open access is when academic research is made freely available online for anyone to read and re-use. As with open access journals, t ...

s, the full text of all books published by OBP is licensed under Creative Commons Licenses, although some third party content (e.g. images and music) is not. OBP has four main sources of revenue: #Sales Revenue: Along with the free editions, the publisher retails five different editions (

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes styled ''ePub''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones ...

, and

MOBI Mobi or MOBI may refer to: Companies * Mobi (company), an American wireless provider Computing * .mobi, internet top domain name * .mobi, a file extension of the deprecated Mobipocket e-book format People * Mobi Fehr (born 1994), American soc ...

). These editions are sold via their website and through all the expected retail channels (Amazon, etc.). #Publishing Grants: Though OBP does not impose a mandatory publishing charge on authors, they do encourage authors to apply for grants to offset publication costs. #Library Membership Scheme: Member libraries pay an annual fee and OBP in turn provides a range of reader-targeted benefits for members of the subscribing university. #OBP Grants and Donations: general donations and grants given directly to OBP to support their work. As a not-for-profit enterprise, all excess revenue at OBP is reinvested in the company and this enables OBP to publish

books by authors with limited funding. Academic merit and public value determine publication decisions, not ability to pay a fee.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Open Book Publishers Non-profit academic publishers Creative Commons-licensed works Open access publishers Publishing companies established in 2008 Companies based in Cambridge Creative Commons books publishing companies

History

Business model

See also

References

External links