📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout!

🚨 Please be advised that, due to the holiday season, shipping delays may occur. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.

Information for Authors

Welcome! This page contains a wealth of information for authors wanting to find out more about publishing with us. First, let us introduce ourselves.

We are a leading independent open access book publisher of high-quality academic research, based in Cambridge, UK, with more than seventeen years’ experience publishing award-winning OA books. We are scholar-led, not-for-profit and dedicated to making excellent academic research freely available to readers all over the world.

How to use this page

  1. If you want a quick overview, watch the video above.
  2. If you want a more comprehensive overview, keep reading this page.
  3. If you want to leap into the detail, download our Author Guide.
  4. If you want to propose a book for publication, download our Book Proposal Form.
  5. If you want to speak to an OBP author about what it's like to publish an academic book with us, contact Professor Caroline Warman (caroline.warman@Jesus.ox.ac.uk). NB: Please don't send Caroline book proposals or projects to review!

Our book proposal form

Download

Why publish with us

  • Open access. All of our books are open access: permanently and freely available under an open licence to download or read online in PDF and HTML formats. We also produce affordably priced and well-designed paperback, hardback and EPUB copies.
  • No mandatory OA fees. We don’t charge our authors mandatory open access fees. Instead, our publishing programme is supported by a mix of grant funding (if available), our Library Membership Programme and sales. Find out more about our funding model.
  • High standards. Our books are rigorously peer-reviewed, carefully edited and excellently produced. Find out more about our prizewinning books and what our authors say about us.
  • Author control. You retain your copyright; you choose the open licence your book is published under; and for more restrictive open licences, you decide on commercial or derivative reuse requests. Find out more about open licences.
  • Variable length. We are flexible about the length of manuscript we publish: we’re happy to publish books that are longer or shorter than the standard length for an academic monograph.
  • Innovative books. We welcome proposals that engage with the presentation of knowledge in new ways. Many of our titles also provide additional digital resources that further enrich the research shared in the book. Find out more about our innovative publications and see some examples.
  • Quick and efficient. We aim to make publishing decisions within three months of receipt of the full MS, and we aim to conclude the publication process within four months of receiving the final MS.
  • Focused on scholarly worth. We are interested in the quality of scholarship, not what will sell.
  • Global visibility. Our books are read and downloaded in high numbers all over the world, and we share this information with our authors and with the wider world. Find out more.
  • Wide distribution. Our titles are shared on our website and via other open platforms. They are also available via Print-on-Demand in paperback and hardback (meaning they are never out of print) and can be ordered from any country. They are available to buy on our website and through major retail outlets and distribution channels (find out more). They are listed in SCOPUS, BACON, WorldCat (OCLC), Clarivate's Book Citation Index, BASE, CERES, The Publication Forum (JUFO), Spanish National Research Council's Scholarly Publishing Indicator, ROAD: the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, and the Directory of Open Access Books. Universities and research libraries worldwide subscribe to our Library Membership Programme, so your book will be listed in the catalogues of over 270 major university libraries worldwide (and counting).
  • Effective archiving and preservation. Our books are preserved in the UK legal deposit libraries at the British Library; at the Internet Archive and Zenodo via the Thoth Open Archiving Network; and at Portico via OAPEN. All our titles are available through Google Books, which is committed to long-term preservation of their digital editions. The HTML editions of all our titles, together with any web links embedded into the publication, are uploaded to the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.

How to publish with us

We invite prospective authors to submit their complete, or near-complete, manuscript and book proposal to our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) using our Book Proposal Form. Book proposals will be carefully reviewed by our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi, with the support of our editorial board and any relevant series boards. If the proposal is of interest, we will ask for the full manuscript and we will send this for review by at least two experts in the field. We offer careful evaluation of any book proposal or sample material, and constructive advice throughout the period of publication.

A submission will only be considered where the manuscript has not been offered for publication elsewhere. There is no word limit or limit in the number of images included in our books, and other materials, including additional text, visual images (static and moving), and audio, can be added online if they would enhance the work.

Find out more about submitting a book to us for publication.

Get into the details

Want to know more? Dig into the sources below.