Follow our new Transforming Society blog and win a book!

As a follower of the Policy Press blog you may have noticed that you haven’t heard from us in a while. We have recently launched the Transforming Society blog… take a look at this exciting space where research and critique can create positive social change here.

Follow Transforming Society in the next 48 hours to be in with a chance of winning a Policy Press or Bristol University Press book of your choice. We will contact the winner by email on Friday.

Just enter your email address here:

… to be in with a chance to win.

Good luck!

Transforming Society: our new blog for Bristol University Press and Policy Press

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new blog Transforming Society, where research, evidence and critique can create positive social change.

Our current Policy Press blog will remain as an archive of our blog pieces to date, but going forward, all new pieces will only be published on Transforming Society. We hope you will come over and join us in our new space, and continue to support us in our endeavour to help research make a difference.

If you currently receive email notifications from us about new blog posts, and would like to continue receiving these, please sign-up again on Transforming Society as we cannot transfer these alerts.

Find out more

Why we are proud to be part of academic publishing #AcBookWeek

Victoria Pittman

This Academic Book Week, and ten months after the publication of the first Bristol University Press title, Victoria Pittman, our Head of Commissioning, looks back over the year, showcasing our lists so far and explaining why we’re proud and privileged to be part of the academic publishing world.

“Although I read my share of academic books during my own time at university, it wasn’t until I worked in academic publishing that I really appreciated the huge variety and importance of these books, and what goes into creating them. Academic Book Week is a great opportunity to celebrate their contribution and at BUP we are excited to be part of a conversation which celebrates the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books.

It’s a little under a year since BUP launched, building on the success of Policy Press and expanding our range of titles across new subject areas, authors and audiences in the social sciences and aligned disciplines. Publishing books which are of the highest academic quality, we work with internationally recognised experts and it has been a fantastic year so far. We feel proud to be a University Press that academics trust to publish their important research.

Our first titles have ranged from those which launched new series such as The Politics of Compassion: Immigration and Asylum Policy by Ala Sirriyeh which was the first tile in the Global Migration and Social Change series, to accessible and topical books like Amitai Etzioni’s Law and Society in a Populist Age: Balancing Individual Rights and the Common Good.

A number of monographs across the lists show the range of subject areas we cover:

• How Language Works in Politics: The Impact of Vague Legislation on Policy by Matthew Williams
• Disrupting Rape Culture: Public Space, Sexuality and Revolt by Alexandra Fanghanel
• The Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy by Anthony Lloyd
• Women’s Work: How Mothers Manage Flexible Working in Careers and Family Life by Zoe Young

Across our Shorts (books between 30-50,000 words), we have published titles which provide the latest cutting-edge or topical research findings, including Prison Suicide: What Happens Afterwards? by Philippa Tomczak and Making Waves Behind Bars: The Prison Radio Association by Charlotte Bedford.

Other titles like The Lies We Were Told: Politics, Economics, Austerity and Brexit by Simon Wren-Lewis, a Prose award finalist, have been reviewed as important and influential with Paul Krugman writing in the preface: ‘This is a book you should read, for understanding what went wrong in the past is our only hope of doing better in the future’.

Creating this impact is fundamental to our mission. The titles above, and the many others I could mention, show the huge value of academic book publishing in bringing essential research evidence and insights to a wider audience, joining debates and influencing policymakers.

To support this, we produce policy briefings for government, such as this one for Whose Government is It? The Renewal of State-Citizen Cooperation by Henry Tam. Media coverage, such as this piece in the Independent adapted from Who are Universities For? Re-making Higher Education by Tom Sperlinger, Josie McLellan and Richard Pettigrew, makes academic research relevant and increases its capacity to create change.

In short, this is a wonderful industry to be part of and one we hope continues to thrive.

 

Visit our website to find out more about our new and forthcoming books and journals, as well as others from our imprint Policy Press and other news about our publishing.

Our spring catalogue is out now. Download a pdf here.

 

Sustainable Open Access and Impact: Celebrating OA Week

Julia Mortimer

We are delighted to be a part of the Open Access Week celebrations and to be able to showcase OA content and initiatives at Bristol University Press and Policy Press. Journals and OA Director, Julia Mortimer, explains why.

Our OA books and recent articles are all brought together to view and access here.

Why OA is important for us

Our vision is to create and disseminate critically acclaimed, evidence-based work that has the potential to make a difference in the world. Over the past two decades we have built a reputation dedicated to that vision.

We have set our sights on publishing great scholarship that addresses the global social challenges and broader social science issues that face the world community today. A commitment to OA is crucial to this vision for the following reasons:

Visibility & impact: OA makes research more widely and easily visible to researchers, practitioners and policy makers if the content is discoverable and efficiently marketed.

Collaboration: OA publication fosters greater dialogue across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Social Justice: OA reduces inequalities in access to knowledge due to lack of institutional funding.

As a publisher committed to making an impact in the real world, sustainable open access has obvious benefits for us and our authors in reaching our goals. Authors can make their work accessible, safe in the knowledge that our rigorous quality standards, excellent marketing services and strong reputation will still apply.

What we offer

We offer a range of flexible open access options for both journals and book publishing which continue to evolve, and we are always interested in working with our authors to explore new ideas.

Both Green and Gold options are available for all our journal and book content and we are flexible to allow for funder compliance. See our open access options for books and open access options for journals for more information.

For journals our OA content is available to access on our IngentaConnect platform where it is clearly signposted.

For books we make our OA content available via OAPEN and JSTOR and we are delighted to be a part of the Knowledge Unlatched collections which are funded by libraries.

We offer discounts on our standard APCs to researchers in developing countries and to those in institutions who subscribe to our journal collections.

We are also working with a range of partners to improve OA metadata distribution and discoverability of our OA content, an important issue in current OA debates.

A sustainable model of OA publishing in the social sciences

At Bristol University Press and Policy Press we work hard to make as much content open as possible, whilst ensuring that we can cover the necessary costs involved in a high-quality publishing operation and the all-important marketing, promotion and discoverability activities needed to ensure OA content can be found. This is a crucial balancing act and a question of ensuring publishing OA is sustainable in an uncertain funding environment. Most importantly, it also gives authors a choice and equitable opportunity to publication when OA funds and routes may not be easily accessible, and they need to publish in publications and with publishers of high repute.

The OA agenda has been led by STM disciplines but, in our view, initiatives like Plan S are not easily applicable to the social sciences where funding models are currently much less clear. This is why we are committed to a mixed model of OA/non-OA publishing at this point in time.

OA and free content initiatives

We have experimented with innovative approaches to OA and free content to ensure our content reaches its intended audiences. Much of our journal content is free, either on a permanent basis for sections like Debates and Issues or Voices from the Frontline, or via Most read and Editor’s Choice collections which are free for regular periods during the year.

Many of our Shorts, designed to meet the needs of busy policy makers and practitioners, are OA, they are brief, and free to share to influence policy and practice.

For our book Being a scholar in the digital era, chapters were free to access on a monthly basis for the first year and the whole book available OA thereafter. As no OA funding was available, this allowed us to simultaneously cover the publishing costs whilst also making content open.

We provide Executive Summaries for many of our books which are freely available and especially useful for policy makers and practitioners to make use of research findings.

In addition to these and many other impact-focused activities we have just launched a brand-new blog on the Futures of Work to stimulate debate, ideas and interaction.

Bristol University Press and Policy Press are also a main sponsor of the highly successful social research blog Discover Society. Our authors are actively encouraged to share their work through writing blogs, magazine features and newspaper articles, to disseminate their work widely but often more accessibly than straightforward OA can.

 

Please explore all the OA and freely available content that Bristol University Press has to offer and contact Julia Mortimer (email julia.mortimer@bristol.ac.uk) to discuss OA options for your work.

What makes for a strong Voluntary Sector Review paper? Eight points to consider

Rob Macmillan, Nick Acheson and Bernard Harris, editors of the international Voluntary Sector Review journal, present 8 tips for submitting a strong paper. 

Rob Macmillan, Nick Acheson and Bernard Harris

As editors of Voluntary Sector Review (VSR), we attract a wide range of international article submissions, covering the whole range of topics around voluntary and community action, non-profit organisations and civil society. We often reflect on what makes for a strong paper.

Full-length research articles in VSR, normally no longer than 8,000 words in length, may focus on empirical findings, methodological issues, scholarly or theoretical inquiry, and applied analysis of relevance to practitioners and decision makers. We welcome submissions from all parts of the globe, and encourage all of our authors to highlight the international implications of their work.

We know that the whole process of submitting a paper can be daunting and onerous for authors – something you’ve been working on for a while has finally been given over for an external judgement of its potential value. Preparing a good paper for submission is an art rather than a science, and through our experience as editors and authors we have drawn together a list of eight helpful points to consider before you submit your paper.

1. What is the paper about and why is it important?

Be very clear on what the paper is about, starting with a clear statement of the issue that it addresses, together with an explanation of why the issue is of interest to and important for readers of the journal. You need to provide good reasons for readers to read on and subsequently remember your article.

2. Critical understanding of the literature

Embed the issue the paper addresses in the relevant literature, with a critical understanding of the most important and influential previous articles and books in this area.

3. Intellectual, theoretical, policy or practice context

Make sure you set out clearly the intellectual, theoretical, policy or practice context that informs the article.

4. Methods

Where you are reporting empirical findings, make sure the research design, data collection methods and analysis techniques used are described in sufficient detail for readers to be able to understand how the study might be replicated, and on what basis the conclusions are being drawn. Where prior literature provides the basis for the article (in addition to or instead of empirical findings), explain how it was sourced, selected and reviewed.

5. Key findings

Set out the key findings relevant to the issue addressed in the article in a systematic way, relating them to earlier work covered in the literature review. Authors often try to say too much here, overloading their submission with empirical findings such that the point of the article is obscured in empirical detail.

6. Contribution to knowledge

Identify the extent and ways in which the findings and discussion contribute to new empirical knowledge about the issue or better theoretical understanding of the topic. There is a balance to be struck here: be confident in the conclusions you draw, but don’t overstate the case.

7. Implications for future research, policy or practice

Draw out the implications of the study for future research, policy or practice – in the country which is the primary focus of the article, but also more broadly where appropriate.

8. Argument, structure, and signposting

Finally, check to see whether there is a clear, well-signposted, structure and thread of argument running through the paper, so that readers can quickly gain a secure sense of the paper’s development from introduction to conclusion.

On receipt of a submission, we will always make an initial editorial judgement before we send a paper out for review, and we may ask you to revise the paper before doing so. We encourage reviewers to provide constructive feedback to authors in order to help improve papers, and we will provide guidance on how to proceed if the decision is one of ‘revise and resubmit’. The peer review process can be exacting but it is rigorous and invariably leads to better quality papers.

We would encourage you to get in touch if you have an idea for a paper but are not sure of its suitability. We’ll always aim to provide helpful guidance, though, of course, we cannot provide any guarantees of publication.

If you would like to submit a paper you can find the Journal’s aims and scope, and instructions for authors on the Voluntary Sector Review website. You will also find further information about submitting Policy and Practice articles, along with details of the relevant editors for these sections.

 

More about Voluntary Sector Review

To submit an article consult our instructions for authors.

For news about all the latest issues and free articles sign up for our e-newsletter and follow the journal on Twitter @VSRjournal

Ask your librarian to subscribe or sign up for a free institutional trial.

Open access: A publisher’s perspective

Julia Mortimer, Journals Director at Bristol University Press/Policy Press, explores the benefits, opportunities and challenges of open access (OA), one of the most significant publishing developments since the invention of the printing press.  

Julia Mortimer

 

Unleashing potential

There have been extraordinary benefits from OA in furthering scientific endeavour, innovation, business development and public knowledge. Lives have been saved because medical research and datasets have been openly available. Digital access has made this all possible and has enabled research outputs to reach a broader audience beyond a paywall.

For Policy Press, and the newly created Bristol University Press, as a not-for-profit publisher with a social mission, OA is crucial in helping the work we publish have a greater impact on society and for public good.

Just some of the benefits to authors are:

Visibility & impact: OA makes research more widely and easily visible to researchers, practitioners and policy makers.

Usage: A number of studies and reports have shown that OA journal articles are viewed more often than articles available only to subscribers (See this article in the BMJ for example).

Collaboration: OA publication fosters greater dialogue across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Social Justice: OA reduces inequalities in access to knowledge due to lack of institutional funding.

What is the future of social justice? A Policy Press event

Answers to this question were offered at the Policy Press The Future of Social Justice event held on Monday 5th December in association with the Bristol Festival of Ideas.

The Great Hall in the University of Bristol’s Will’s Memorial Building was packed with over 800 audience members who heard Danny Dorling, Owen Jones, Kayleigh Garthwaite and Melissa Benn speak about the most significant successes, challenges and opportunities for social justice.

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The exciting event began with the official launch of University of Bristol Press by Professor Hugh Brady, Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Bristol.

Inspiring contributions from the speakers followed, expertly chaired by Alison Shaw, Director of Policy Press and University of Bristol Press.

Amongst the many points made, Melissa Benn focused on segregation in schools and the way this feeds into a lack of understanding and knowledge about others. Danny Dorling examined housing policy, highlighting the urgent need for rent control. Kayleigh Garthwaite highlighted that allowing charity to become ‘normal’ and acceptable is not the way forward. Finally, Owen Jones reminded us that we need a collective thought process in order to solve collective issues. One of the key message of the evening was that we need to step out of the ‘bubble’ and into communities.

2016 has been a dark year but this event inspired optimism and hope. What will we say to future generations when they ask what we did at at time like this? It’s time to come together and be active in our opposition to injustice.

 

Didn’t get a chance to attend? You can listen to the event in full on Soundcloud here.

Read Danny Dorling’s full speech on the housing crisis and hope for the future from the event.

Read Kayleigh Garthwaite’s full speech on foodbanks and why we need a new conversation about poverty.

Keep up-to-date with Policy Press/University of Bristol Press news and events by signing up to our newsletter. Subscribers also receive a code for 35% discount on all our books.

2016: a good year for publishing with a purpose

It’s rare that there’s something positive to say about 2016, given the recent political upheaval, but we’re thankful that it has been a good year for Policy Press.

Alison Shaw

We celebrated 20 years, won an Independent Publishers Guild award and are about to host a high-profile Festival of Ideas event. Most significantly, October saw the announcement of the new University of Bristol Press, an exciting new venture in collaboration with the University of Bristol.

Here, Director Alison Shaw explains the developments, highlights key moments from 2016 and describes what they mean to her.

Creating the University of Bristol Press

The formation of University of Bristol Press (UBP) is the beginning of an exciting new era. When I created Policy Press (PP) 20 years ago I never dreamed that we would have achieved so much. UBP represents a wonderful recognition of our team’s achievements, and an opportunity to take what we have learned into new disciplines.

With the creation of UBP we will be able to expand into new areas – economics, politics and international development, business and management and law – whilst continuing our commitment to high quality scholarship and author care. We will also be expanding our publishing in sociology, criminology and social geography under UBP, keeping the Policy Press imprint focused on social problems and social action.

“…new opportunities for our authors and their work.”

The world has changed dramatically since 1996. The world of scholarly research dissemination, teaching and learning especially has changed and, with UBP, we can help support the international academic community through these developments. Flexible formats, Open Access and digital developments are all roads we are travelling down, allowing us to offer new opportunities for our authors and their work.

We are delighted to be part of the thriving University Press sector here in the UK. I believe there is a resurgence in support for University Presses, both among scholars and educational institutions, as publishers from within the scholarly community working for the scholarly community. It is extremely important to me that we continue to operate as a not-for-profit press focused on this community and not shareholders.

The social mission at the heart of what we do

I was not shocked by Brexit or by the election of Donald Trump. I am afraid the work we publish led me to predict that both votes would happen. I believe that when people see their standard of living fall and no clear future ahead, they retract into their own communities and fear those that are ‘other’ than themselves.  There are many other factors behind both votes, but the outcome is the that the ‘left behind’ in our globalised world have made their voices heard.

I am equally unsurprised by the continued lack of care for the most vulnerable in our society we saw with the announcements in last Wednesday’s autumn statement. The gap between rich and poor is ever growing and policy, unfortunately, continues to benefit the better off. In these cruel times of austerity and political turmoil, we will continue our ongoing commitment to social change through our publishing under the Policy Press imprint.

“I was not shocked by Brexit or by the election of Donald Trump.”

Making a difference and finding ways for research to reach an audience where it can help policy and practice to address social issues and improve individual’s lives has remained fundamental to the development of the business. Policy Press will keep its focus on these social action aspects where UBP will focus on the more traditional scholarly work across all the core social science disciplines.

Winning the IPG award

Winning the IPG Frankfurt Bookfair Independent Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year award was a turning point for Policy Press.

This recognition by our industry means so much to me, and to the team. It means that all the hard work over 20 years incrementally building a business from its tiny start was a goal worth pursuing.

It says ‘thank you’ to the amazing authors, editors and partners that we work with and without whom we could not have won the award. It also shows that the faith the University of Bristol has shown in us has been repaid a little.

Why we’re hosting ‘The Future of Social Justice’ event

On 5 December we are hosting ‘The future of social justice’ event in Bristol, with Melissa Benn, Danny Dorling, Kayleigh Garthwaite and Owen Jones speaking. It’s a huge privilege to bring together these speakers and the general public in a debate that I’m sure will present some hope for the future.

This will also be the final event in our 20 year celebrations and the official launch of University of Bristol Press by Professor Hugh Brady, University of Bristol Vice-Chancellor and President.

And the future?

I am optimistic about the future for publishing and fundamentally believe that if we continue to publish great quality books and journals well, University of Bristol Press and Policy Press will continue to go from strength to strength. We will be there to help researchers, teachers and professionals to get their work read and used.

“Every single book or journal article we publish educates and, in so doing, has the potential to change the world”

Over the next few years the team is going to grow significantly, with new staff from commissioning to marketing and sales. This will bring exciting new opportunities for creative collaboration and product development as we become stronger in our existing subject areas and emerge in those that are new. Policy Press, as an imprint, is now in a better place than ever to produce books that can really make a difference.

Every single book or journal article we publish educates and, in so doing, has the potential to change the world a tiny bit. That’s the beauty of publishing – particularly academic publishing – and of being a press dedicated to making a positive difference.

It’s in this that a more hopeful, socially just, future lies.

Keep up-to-date with developments at Policy Press/University of Bristol Press by signing up to our newsletter. You will also receive a code that gives you 35% off all our books when ordered at www.policypress.co.uk.

Open education is not a luxury

Polly Thistlethwaite

Polly Thistlethwaite, co-author of Being a scholar in the digital era talks about open education and how higher education’s practices and products must become more democratic to better serve democracy.

Chapter 3 of Being a scholar in the digital era – ‘Opening education and linking it to community’ – is free to download here (pdf), or from the Policy Press website during December. Subsequent chapters will be available over the coming months.

Audre Lorde famously asserted that “for women … poetry is not a luxury.” Artistry and lived experience shared, while valued less than dominant notions of thought and process, is “a vital necessity of our existence,” she wrote (Lorde, Audre. Poetry is Not a Luxury. Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, 1977, no. 3.).

Open education is no less a luxury. Markets cannot administer equitable access to education or to cultural and scientific information any better than they can fairly manage access to health care. To invoke Lorde’s essay once again, it is vital to share “living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with,” to deepen understanding, to resist oppressions, and to improve lives.

Why do you want to be published? Open Access and making a difference

In this guest blog post about the publication of her book ‘Being a scholar in the digital era‘ with Jessie Daniels, Polly Thistlethwaite reflects on why she believes information should be able to be widely accessed and shows how publishers can help to make this happen.

Chapter 2 of Being a scholar in the digital era is free to download here (pdf), or from the Policy Press website during October. Subsequent chapters will be available over the coming months.

Polly Thistlethwaite

Jessie Daniels’ second book Cyber Racism came out in 2009, published by an academic press that sold books mostly to academic libraries in paper and ebook formats that were entirely closed, locked behind paywalls. Interested readers had to either buy a copy or be affiliated with university libraries to get it.

Then, Jessie discovered the whole world of ‘torrents’. This is the practice that students call ‘ripping’ but what publishers call ‘illegal downloads’. She notified her publisher about the unauthorized downloads, but the publisher, to her surprise, didn’t intervene. She scoured the websites to find contacts herself and emailed site owners to take down unauthorized copies of her book. One person in the UK had posted the book on his blog. Jessie contacted the administrator of the blog network to point to this violation of their terms of service and asked that the copy be taken down. It was. Time passed…