Awards and prizes

OBP has won a number of awards for our publishing output and activities. We have achieved a 9/10 social impact score in the SE100 Rankings 2019 and are among the top 100 social enterprises in the NatWest SE100 2020, the NatWest SE100 2021, NatWest SE100 2022, and the NatWest SE100 2023. We have been shortlisted for the 2017 and 2014 WISE Awards. We won the 2013 IFLA/Brill Open Access award for initiatives in open access monograph publishing and the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) blue ribbon panel of industry experts selected OBP to be one of seven high-impact Open Access organizations, among journal publishers and content providers. We are also a key partner in the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which in 2019 was awarded a £2.2 million grant from the Research England Development fund and £800,000 from Arcadia Fund to build community-controlled, open systems and infrastructures to develop and strengthen open access book publishing.

Many of our books have also been recognised with prizes for the quality of their scholarship and the innovation of their presentation. Our award-winning titles are listed below.

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Winner of the 2023 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

CHOICE awards outstanding works for their excellence in presentation and scholarship, the significance of their contribution to the field, their originality and value as an essential treatment of the subject, and significance in building undergraduate collections.

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Winner of the 2023 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence for Best History in the category Best Historical Research in Classical Music.

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Winner of the 2022 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

CHOICE awards outstanding works for their excellence in presentation and scholarship, the significance of their contribution to the field, their originality and value as an essential treatment of the subject, and significance in building undergraduate collections.

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Winner of the 2022 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

CHOICE awards outstanding works for their excellence in presentation and scholarship, the significance of their contribution to the field, their originality and value as an essential treatment of the subject, and significance in building undergraduate collections.

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Winner of the R. Gapper Book Prize 2021 for best book in French Studies.

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Winner of the 2021 Frank Moore Cross Book Award for best book related to the history and/or religion of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. This book presents the current state of knowledge of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew and a full edition of one of the key medieval sources, Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ ‘The Guide for the Reader’, by ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn.

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Winner of the 2020 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

Easy to read, this lucid and accessible textbook includes fifteen chapters that cover a full range of conservation topics, including threats to biodiversity, environmental laws, and protected areas management, as well as related topics such as sustainability, poverty, and human-wildlife conflict.

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Winner of the 2020 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic and technological changes in Russia have created a wide range of new possibilities and constraints in the pursuit of different ways of life.

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Martin Eve was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2019, and we are particularly proud that Literature Against Criticism formed a substantial part of his submission portfolio for the award. The Philip Leverhulme Prize recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers at an early stage of their careers, whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. We are delighted that Martin and Literature Against Criticism have been recognised in this way.

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Winner of the 2019 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for best book on Victorian newspapers and periodicals – awarded annually by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

A Fleet Street in Every Town positions the local paper at the centre of debates on Victorian newspapers, periodicals, reading and publishing. It reorientates our view of the Victorian press away from metropolitan high culture and parliamentary politics, and towards the places where most people lived, loved and read. This is an essential book for anybody interested in nineteenth-century print culture, journalism and reading.

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Winner of the 2018 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time.

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Winner of the 2017 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Title.

Rudy considers ways in which book owners adjusted the contents of their books from the simplest (add a marginal note, sew in a curtain) to the most complex (take the book apart, embellish the components with painted decoration, add more quires of parchment). By making sometimes extreme adjustments, book owners kept their books fashionable and emotionally relevant. Piety in Pieces explores the intersection of codicology and human desire.

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Winner of the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies' 2015 Prize for Digital Publication.

Probably completed in 1772-73, Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew fascinated Goethe, Hegel, Engels and Freud in turn, achieving a literary-philosophical status that no other work by Diderot shares. This interactive, multi-media and bilingual edition offers a brand new translation of Diderot’s famous dialogue, and it also gives the reader much more. Portraits and biographies of the numerous individuals mentioned in the text, from minor actresses to senior government officials, enable the reader to see the people Diderot describes, and provide a window onto the complex social and political context that forms the backdrop to the dialogue. Links to musical pieces specially selected by Pascal Duc and performed by students of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, illuminate the wider musical context of the work, enlarging it far beyond its now widely understood relation to opéra comique.

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Winner of the 2014 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award.

This is the first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship. Just like canonical literature and music, the ballad should not be seen as a uniquely authentic item inextricably tied to a documented source, but rather as an unstable structure subject to the vagaries of production, reception, and editing. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades.