The coronavirus pandemic is challenging us all. At Open Book Publishers, we are continuing with our work—albeit from our separate homes, rather than our office in central Cambridge—publishing academic books that are freely available online to read, download and share.
Readers: please continue to enjoy and share our books. They are are available online with no paywall: you can read, download and reuse them in PDF, HTML and XML formats without charge, as always and for always.
Authors: please continue to submit your proposals to us, if you have them.
We are also still taking orders for our paperback, hardback, EPUB and MOBI editions, if you prefer a physical copy or would like to support our work with a purchase. (You can also support us with a donation if you wish.)
We wish safety and good health to our readers, our authors, and to everyone who is caught up in the current situation.
COVID19 and Open Access
During this period of crisis, the need for Open Access resources has become obvious to all. Most evidently, people need access to medical information, and those attempting to treat the virus and halt its spread need access to the relevant research (both the most recent work and the long tail on all relevant topics).
As well as this, people need easy and free access to high-quality content in a range of subject areas: to educate their children at home, to fill their time meaningfully and pleasurably in isolation, to continue with research projects, to take their minds off the whirl of news, to help them learn or write or think or plan.
The open availability of high-quality academic work—open to read, to share, to reuse and to build on in perpetuity, not simply free to read for a limited time at a publisher's discretion—is necessary at all times. This need is particularly obvious now.
So we will continue, as best as we can and with as much care as we can, to do our work: to publish brilliantly written, beautifully formatted books that are completely free to access online, to share and to reuse. We hope that they will do some good during this difficult and challenging period—and beyond it.
Curated resources: disease control, remote conferencing and more
Here we offer links to a number of resources that we hope will be particularly useful at this time. This list will be updated with new resources as they arise.
- Pre-publication chapters and a series of blog posts about the what, why and how of staging an online conference, taken from the peer-reviewed manuscript for the forthcoming Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, edited by Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier.
- 'Open Education is key to the future of learning', a blog post by OBP author Patrick Blessinger on Open Education, with links to freely available resources and tools (including some of our Open Access textbooks) that might be useful for anyone trying to learn at home, or trying to support someone else in learning at home.
- Reflections on Open Education from our textbook authors, with links to their books (all free to read online, download and share).
- Our textbooks are all Open Access (as are all of our books).
- Check out OAPEN and the DOAB for thousands of Open Access books on topics of all kinds.
- A blog post from our ScholarLed and COPIM colleague Vincent van Gerven Oei of punctum books: 'Viral Open Access in Times of Global Pandemic'.
- COMING SOON: A blog post written for the COPIM project by our editor Lucy Barnes, about the organisation of a thirty-person remote workshop: what worked, what didn't, what you might like to try.
- COMING SOON: A blog post by Rachel Archer, one of the authors of our recently published book, Non-Communicable Disease Prevention: Best Buys, Wasted Buys and Contestable Buys, about the importance of Open Access for medical research.