Excerpt #1
UCL Press’s mission is to make high-quality scholarship available to readers all over the world, all of our books are published open access and freely available in downloadable PDF and from a range of global OA platforms. If you’re writing in the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences then we’d love to hear from you. We welcome proposals for monographs, short monographs, edited volumes and textbooks.
Book projects are developed through a rigorous peer-review process, managed by our experienced team of commissioning editors. We aim to offer a supportive service that helps our authors get the very best out of their work.
We combine the benefits of traditional scholarly publishing with open access dissemination. Your book will be available as an open access download, and also in print, meaning that it has the potential to reach a wide and diverse readership. Why not take a look at our Statistics page to see just how well our titles perform around the world – we are pleased to openly share information about our book downloads.
“Working with UCL Press on Ancient Knowledge Networks was a really positive experience. Their high editorial standards and impeccable design led to a beautiful end result. Importantly, as well as being available in print, my book is also open access on their platform – so free for anyone to download.”
Professor Eleanor Robson, School of History, UCL and author of Ancient Knowledge Networks
“I believe that my book will potentially be a very widely used textbook, in countries such as India and China and beyond. It will benefit from open access since these countries, with poorer students and academics, may otherwise not have access.”
Professor Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute, co-author of The Web as History, and author of Social Theory after the Internet
Publication of a scholarly work through UCL Press is open to everyone, and free of cost to current UCL staff. A moderate book processing charge (BPC) is payable by non-UCL staff. You can find out more in Financing Your Book.
Excerpt #2
UCL Press was established to further UCL’s commitment to widespread dissemination of scholarly research via open access, and to disrupt the traditional publishing model of high prices and low sales. The open access model is exciting, and our international downloads show that worldwide demand for scholarly content is very strong.
But while the costs of production and promotion remain the same as for print books, open access publications generate relatively little income to pay for them, so funding has to come from elsewhere. UCL Press meets all publication costs for authors and editors based at UCL, as well as for their collaborators, and we offer a BPC waiver scheme for a number of projects written by non-UCL authors every year. In instances where we can’t fund publication, we’re committed to keeping our book processing charge (BPC) as low as possible while offering the full spread of our services.
This approach to funding enables us to publish the work of authors from all over the world, to the point where now nearly half of UCL Press authors and editors are based outside UCL.
We’re able to offer full funding to:
Publishing open access can pose a challenge to academics who cannot meet the BPC from their funder or their institution. To offer authors and editors in this position the opportunity to publish in open access form with UCL Press, we cover the publication costs of up to five non-UCL projects each year.
To be eligible for this scheme, projects must:
If you’d like to be considered for the scheme, please let your commissioning editor know when you introduce your project to them. We ask applicants to the scheme to demonstrate they’ve tried to find funding to cover the BPC.
If you’re a non-UCL author who’s received funding to publish in open access form, we’re delighted to offer a full service at a fraction of the cost asked by many commercial publishers.
Our BPC is on a rising scale, depending on book length, and is applied as follows:
(Please add £1,000 to all BPCs for colour printing.)
Note that UK Value Added Tax (VAT) will be added to the fee, where applicable.
If you have any queries on the above, please do contact one of our commissioning editors.