Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

academic book 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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. 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 ha ...

and

community interest company A community interest company (CIC, pronounced "see-eye-see", or colloquially, "kick") is a form of social enterprise in the United Kingdom intended "for people wishing to establish businesses which trade with a social purpose..., or to carry on ...

(CIC) that promotes open access for academic

monographs A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

, edited collections, critical editions and textbooks in the

Humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including Philosophy, certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature a ...

Social Sciences Social science (often rendered in the plural as the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of society, societies and the Social relation, relationships among members within those societies. The term was former ...

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

and

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

. 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 Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

and

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

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 that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

, Worldreader, OpenEdition,

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 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 reader or e device, is a Mobile computing, mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and Periodical literature, periodicals. Any device that can display text on ...

and 2G mobile phones via Worldreader. Open Book Publishers is a partner in the COPIM project, building not-for-profit community-owned, open infrastructures to enable

open access book An open-access monograph (open-access book or OA book) is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license. These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open ac ...

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 and Alessandra Tosi, both academics from the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

. William St Clair 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 technology OBP titles are also available in

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

and

hardback A hardcover, hard cover, or hardback (also known as hardbound, and sometimes as casebound (At p. 247.)) book is one bound with rigid protective covers (typically of binder's board or heavy paperboard covered with buckram or other cloth, heavy ...

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 (open-access book or OA book) is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license. These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open ac ...

s, the full text of all books published by OBP is licensed under

Creative Commons Licenses A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...

, 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 stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

, and

MOBI Mobi or MOBI may refer to: Companies * Mobi (company) mobi, Inc. is a wireless carrier founded in 2004 and based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. The company provides service on each of the major islands of Hawaiʻi, as well as on the mainland Unit ...

). 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