University of Westminster Press is delighted to have been accepted as a member of the Open Book Collective (OBC) – a new charity set up to help non-profit, community-led open access publishers like UWP attract funding for book publishing activities from libraries across the globe. This provides an alternate route to funding OA books that isn’t reliant on the dominant Book Processing Charge (BPC), the funding mechanism favoured by commercial publishers. The BPC has come under much criticism in recent years and OBC’s approach will help create a more sustainable and equitable ecosystem for OA book publications.
UWP’s membership of OBC comes at a crucial time: as the Press has grown beyond expectations since its founding in 2015, having published our 56th book in February this year alongside 6 journals, our business model has come under increasing pressure. Our home institution’s commitment to providing wide access to education, and to equity and inclusivity, means that at UWP we too are committed to ensuring not only that our publications are free to access by readers but also that opportunities to publish with us are available to as wide a constituency of academic authors as possible and are not limited by the need to charge author facing fees. Imposing fees for publishing via a BPC unfairly impacts researchers who don’t have access to funding, or who are based in the global South, as well as those working in non-STEM disciplines.
For us, membership of OBC means being able to continue to provide a fee-free publishing venue for researchers in the arts, humanities and social science disciplines, which is central to our mission and our values.
But membership of OBC is not only a matter of finances for UWP. It is significant because it is another step in building the infrastructure needed for a new type of scholarly communications ecosystem, one that is, according to Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore, forging new relationalities, developing mutual reliances and shaping new kinds of collaboration. New networks and infrastructures, based on new approaches to co-operation within the system, are vital in challenging the for-profit status quo in academic publishing and realising a vision of a more equitable and ethical future.
UWP is one of the first university presses to have joined OBC, alongside University of London Press and Leuven University Press. Libraries can support us as part of a ‘University Press Package’ or as individual initiatives. We hope this is just the start and that we see many more likeminded institutionally based open publishers joining us as members.
cultural chinais a new open access book series edited by Professor Gerda Wielander, Director of the Contemporary China Centre at the University of Westminster. The series is now open for submissions for book projects of between 35-90,000 words.
Further details about the series and the call are provided below.
The series builds on the success of Cultural China 2020 and Cultural China 2021 which provided up to date, informed and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. The new book series publishes in-depth, peer reviewed research with a focus on the cultural to fill a gap in the field dominated by geo-political and economic concerns. The series aims to diversify and complicate understandings of contemporary China. We also encourage the submission of contextualised translations of Chinese language authors and intellectuals.
cultural china will publish books that critically study Chinese language, cultural practice and production from geographical areas, societies, groups, and individuals not confined by the borders of a nation state. By adopting the use of the lower case in the series title we want to shift the emphasis from a country’s name to a field. We hope that the puzzling encounter of a lower-case ‘c’ will prompt reflections about the ways we often equate individual names and states with homogenous culture.
Thus, cultural china is concerned with all the countries, societies, communities, interest groups and individuals who identify with any of the elements making up China and the Sinophone world, often occupying multiple positions within them or rejecting any association with them altogether. The name for the series acknowledges Tu Weiming’s concept of three symbolic universes (political entities that are predominantly ethnically Chinese; the Chinese diaspora; those studying China), but cultural chinais interested in the less attention grabbing, less hyperbolic, less overpowering yet no less important developments and considerations in the field of culture.
The series aims to provide a critique of conceptual approaches that focus on state power, national boundaries or fixed identities; it promotes interdisciplinary dialogues and debate about the social, cultural, political and historical dynamics conducted from a diverse range of positions like feminism, multiculturalism, communitarianism, religious pluralism and many more.
We are particularly interested in the following topics as well as being open to proposals from other areas too:
history, particularly cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries
film/drama and TV
alternative, independent media
religion, faith and spirituality
psychology and mental health
social studies of illness/disease and medicine
heritage and memory
music and identity
Sinophone diaspora and culture
minority culture/indigineity
Fashion/clothes
language politics
visual art/aesthetics
rural culture and society
disability and the body/mind
gender, identities and sexualities
self, family and others
literature, including poetry
dance, drama and performance
translation
The Editorial Board for the series is comprised of international scholars as listed below.
Dr Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham, UK
Dr Carol Chan, Universidad Mayor Santiago, Chile
Professor Sarah Dauncey, University of Nottingham, UK
Professor Rossella Ferrari, University of Vienna, Austria
Dr Derek Hird, University of Lancaster, UK
Professor Michel Hockx, University of Notre Dame, USA
Dr Seagh Kehoe, University of Westminster, UK
Dr Paul Kendall, University of Westminster, UK
Professor Gregory Lee, University of St Andrews, UK
Dr Nicholas Loubere, University of Lund, Sweden
Dr How Wee Ng, University of Westminster, UK
Dr Anne Witchard, University of Westminster, UK
Dr Cangbai Wang, University of Westminster, UK
Professor Jie Yang, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Dr Yow Cheun Hoe, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore
CALL DETAILS
We welcome proposals that fit the remit of this series from scholars based at any research institution across the globe. All submissions must be between 35,000-90,000 words in length, with a preference for projects that can submit a full draft typescript within 6-12 months. Single and co-authored works as well as edited collections are accepted. We do have a preference for monographs but will also consider suggestions for strong, editorially-led collected volumes. We also encourage the submission of contextualised translations of Chinese language authors and intellectuals.
The submission deadline is 30 April 2024, 23:59 GMT.
Submissions will be shortlisted by the series editor and successful proposals will then be sent for external peer review. All proposals are peer reviewed in accordance with the Association of University Presses guidelines on peer review, and the project will also be assessed by the UWP Editorial Board. Final decisions will be made by mid-July 2024.
Submissions should include a proposal form, which can be downloaded on the UWP website here, author/editor CVs and one sample chapter. The proposal covers the following sections and information:
Book title and author/editor details
Project overview – a synopsis of up to 500 words; three main features of the book that make it distinct; keywords to describe the book
A table of contents and chapter abstracts
Short author/editor biographies featuring 3-5 recent publications
Details of your target audience – for whom do you write this book? Who will read it?
Competing titles – or titles that your project builds on/the debates to which your project contributes
Typescript Information – length, number of illustrations, special features etc
A draft timetable for writing and submission
Sample chapter details
Proposal submissions, and any queries regarding the process, should be made to Richard Baggaley, Press Manager at University of Westminster Press, at R.Baggaley@westminster.ac.uk.
PUBLISHING WITH UWP
UWP is a non-profit open access publisher of humanities and social science research, based in the UK, with a global reach. We support ‘diamond’ open access and most of our publications, including titles published in this series, are made available without fees to either authors or readers. We adhere to the highest standards both in terms of the academic quality of our publications and in our editorial and production work and strive to ensure a best-in-class experience for all our authors.
Books in the series are published open access online in ePUB, Mobi and PDF formats and simultaneously as affordable paperbacks. They are published using a Creative Commons licence (we use CC-BY-NC-ND as our standard licence but can discuss other options), and copyright in the work is retained by the author/editor. Books are hosted on open access sites including JSTOR, OAPEN and the UWP website and indexed by the Directory of Open Access Books and Science Open. You can find out more about publishing with UWP here.
Funding for publications in this call is provided via the Jisc Open Access Community Framework (OACF). This allows us to publish without author-facing fees or book processing charges. We are grateful to libraries at Lancaster University, University of Bristol, University of Manchester, University of Sheffield and University of York for their support of this series.
The Journal of Deliberative Democracy has published a new thematic collection on the theme of ‘deliberation amid deep conflict’. Societies marked by deep divisions post challenges for deliberation. They may have entrenched interests, power inequities and a history of ill-will and misconceptions – yet deliberation also potentially transforms intergroup conflict and promotes reconciliation, mutual respect and cooperation.
Drawing on articles from the last ten years, this collection spotlights the functions, practices and limitations of democratic deliberation during conflict, exploring how deliberation can cultivate recognition and understanding of opposing views within the political system, how it can promote peace, stability and integration in deeply divided societies, the importance of adapting deliberative democracy to local contexts, and the need for empirical investigation by researchers in order to contextualise assumptions about deliberation’s impacts.
Angela Last, Lecturer at the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at the University of Leicester, has joined David Chandler and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos as joint Editor-in-Chief of the University of Westminster Press journal, Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman.
Dr Last is an interdisciplinary scholar who started off in Fashion, where she became interested in environmental and social justice issues in relation to design. After working outside academia for several years, she subsequently completed a PhD in Geography at the Open University, UK. Her research focuses on human-environment relations, and specifically the politicisation of these relations. This research necessitates continued interdisciplinary work, whether in teaching, research or outreach, and she will bring this experience to her work for Anthropocenes. For example, Angela has been working on environmental sound art events, fashion workshops, and taught on the MA in Art & Science at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.
Her main aim in joining the journal is to forward the idea of ‘anthropocenes’ as a multiplicity of relations that humans have with their environment, kin, cosmos, or however they frame their relation, and not simply as ‘Anthropocene’ according to the current (still relatively ambiguous) geological interpretation. She notes, ‘the current planetary emergency requires many of our relations to change, which needs urgent discussion, and for this to be as geographically wide as possible.’ While traditional academic journals have some obvious limitations in terms of reach and economics, Dr Last envisages that Anthropocenes can make creative contributions to the debate by staging interdisciplinary conversations and publishing these in a variety of formats.
Anthropocenes is a fully open access journal, with no fees to authors or readers. It launched in 2020 and has readers in over 130 countries. Articles publish as they are ready to avoid delays in making work publicly available, and the journal actively encourages multimedia and non-traditional submissions including creative writing, audio and visual work. The journal is currently open for submissions – find out more at anthropocenes.net. You can follow Angela Last’s work on her blog Mutable Matter.
London, UK and Ann Arbor, MI, USA – 10 December 2020
The University of Westminster Press and Michigan Publishing Services working with Janeway Systems digital journals publishing platform have reached an agreement whereby they will partner to publish UWP’s six scholarly journals from January 2021.
Andrew Lockett, Press Manager (University of Westminster Press) warmly welcomed the new arrangement: ‘Michigan are at the forefront globally of the innovation and development of academic library publishing services and together with Janeway represent an exciting opportunity for UWP’s activities to be part of the development of sustainable public open source scholarly communication infrastructure. We are excited at the prospect at learning from and working with two innovative teams that share our values and to further enhancing the impact, reach and quality of our new and established journals’.
Jason Colman, Director of Publishing Services (Michigan Publishing) said: “We’re delighted to form this new partnership with the University of Westminster Press and Janeway, who share our commitment to an open and community-owned future for scholarly publishing. We look forward to seeing UWP journals made available to readers on Janeway very soon.”
“We’re very excited to be working with the University of Westminster Press” added Andy Byers, Senior Publishing Technology Developer at Birkbeck, University of London, “and look forward to expanding our existing relationship with Michigan Publishing.”
Additional Information As one of the UK’s first fully open access university presses, the University of Westminster Press has been publishing open access journals since 2015 and open access books since 2016 achieving 850,000 views and downloads thus far for its publications in the process across its books and journals. It has published 170 new journal articles with an archive of 719 articles publishing 33 new books and 6 policy briefs launching the new journals Silk Road – A Journal of Eurasian Development, Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman and (forthcoming in 2021), Active Travel Studies. Its 2020 catalogue recently released was its third and its book publishing and general website continues in its current form with Ubiquity Press.
Michigan Publishing Services is a team of librarians and publishing professionals offering a suite of publishing services to the University of Michigan community and several other partners in the UK, US and worldwide. Its Fulcrum platform offers infrastructure and services that enables the full richness of author’s research output to be published in discoverable, durable, accessible and flexible form. From 2021 Michigan Publishing Services will migrate its own, more than 40 mostly open access journals, to the Janeway Digital Platform.
Janeway is a digital platform designed for publishing scholarly research material. Launched in 2017, the platform provides a workflow for the submission, processing and presentation of scholarly materials. It was developed by Professor Martin Eve, Mauro Sanchez and Andy Byers at the Centre for Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Open Library of Humanities, UK. Janeway is currently used by many publishers and libraries including Michigan Publishing Services, UCL Press, the Open Library of Humanities, Huddersfield University Press, Iowa State Digital Press, the University of Essex, the University of West London and California Digital Library to host its recently launched Preprint serviceEartharxiv.
At the end of #openaccessweek2020 honoured to reflect that since September 2015 open access imprint @UniWestPress has published 254 unique editor/authors in our journals and books from 34 countries. That’s 32 books (incl. edited), 6 policy briefs and 5 distributed titles; 131 new journal articles also making available 719 archive journal articles.
Today we have just had certain confirmation that we have hit over 750,000 views and downloads for our publications already, close to a 50% increase in less than a full year. Over 20% of UWP’s unique authors are University of Westminster authors with on the other hand 58% of contributions originating from outside the UK. Many authors (75) have worked with us more than once. One of our journals Silk Road is based at Westminster International University in Tashkent.
It’s not all about quantities. Our books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese and (shortly) Turkish; one has won a Latin American prize. We’re proud of our diverse range of authors from the global south, Europe, from all corners of the English-speaking world, feminist writers and early career research authors, the academic stars of the future as well as – Jurgen Habermas, Antonio Negri and Jean-Luc Nancy contributors to our list.
University of Westminster Press blog 