By Christina Lenz, Karl Edqvist & Sofie Wennström
Running a full-service academic press is a real endeavour, and the team behind Stockholm University Press is happy to have completed the journey of another year. This year has, like most years, had its ups and downs but we are delighted to conclude a few things before we close our offices during the holiday season.
2017 was a productive year, but a lot of the work was done ‘under the hood’ of the organisation implementing improvements that might not be directly visible from the outside. We have worked hard with fine-tuning our workflows, adding feedback to develop the book management system, and updating guidelines. We have also spent a considerable amount of time to deepen our knowledge about the peer-review process to ensure that our quality assurance process is running smoothly.
New society journal and increased usage of articles
The journals portfolio has been growing, and we have added three new journal contracts; Karib: Nordic Journal of Caribbean Studies, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Studies (SJDR) and Nordic Journal of Francophone Studies/Revue nordique des études francophone. Karib and SJDR came from other publishers, while the francophone journal is a new title releasing its first content during 2018.
SJDR is the first society-owned journal that has been transferred from a big international publisher, where we managed to open up access to the entire archive from volume 1. The past and present presidents of the Nordic Network on Disability Research has explained the reasoning why they chose to change publishers in earlier posts: Flipping Subscription Journals to Open Access – For Whom and to What Cost?, and A Journal and Network in Transition to Open Access.
Another journal that opened up access to their backfiles this year was Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, where we digitised their entire archive from 1977 and onwards. These issues were previously only available in print format in specialist libraries.
The most downloaded article during the year was Newcomer Psychologists and Organizational Socialization: Can a Content Model Capture the Experience?, by Ingvild Sagberg, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, which was downloaded or read online 3,266 times. The six journals that published articles in 2017 has so far attracted 42,667 downloads and HTML views in accumulative numbers. A great achievement!
The growing books catalogue and readership
Three books were published in 2017, Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 1, edited by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Matthew S. Adams; Performativitet, Teoretiska tillämpningar i konstvetenskap: 1 edited by Malin Hedlin Hayden and Mårten Snickare; and Working-Class Literature(s) Historical and International Perspectives edited by John Lennon and Magnus Nilsson.
Performativitet, published in Swedish, is our first textbook intended for use in teaching art history. We want to encourage submissions of more proposals for textbooks to further facilitate access to education to a greater extent. It is also still unusual to have high-quality electronic books in Swedish available to students. Two of the edited collections we made available this year are truly international in scope, and none of the Editors originates from Stockholm University. It is important to us that we do not limit ourselves to publications from just our own institution.
While we finalised three books this year, we also have a lot of projects in the works that are not yet ready for publication. Currently, we are working on eight proposals and ten book manuscripts in different stages of the peer-review process. Three book proposals have been declined during the year.
Launching new books are undoubtedly exciting, but we can also follow the readership of the titles we released in previous years. It takes time to gather readership, and the books are a gift that keeps on giving with regards to statistics. The graph below shows the number of downloads or online readers per title, including statistics from the OAPEN Library, which provides further global online distribution for our books. The total number of downloads to all books in the various formats are 22,428 in accumulative numbers from the day of publication of each title.
Collaboration & Outreach
The introspective nature of 2017 meant that we did not spend as much time on the road to tell the story about Stockholm University Press as we did in previous years. We did, however, still collaborate with colleagues all over the world. We hosted the first AEUP (Association of European University Presses) conference workshop in May, with attendees from eleven European countries. Our Managing Editor Christina Lenz is the secretary and member of the board of AEUP.
As publishing is a collaborative and international operation, press staff continue to engage with LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), via the working groups for Open Access, where Sofie Wennström is the secretary, and Copyright, where Jonas Holm is chairman. We are continuing to be members of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) and ALPSP (The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) to follow developments and network with other publishers.
Happy Holidays!
We would like to send our sincere gratitude and big thanks to all our Authors, Editors, Reviewers, Editorial Boards, and the Publishing Committee for their fantastic contributions. We hope that the efforts and hard work we have spent under the hood during 2017 will continue to flourish next year and we look forward to another thriving Open Access publishing year.
Wishing the Happiest Holidays and a Joyful New Year to all our colleagues, friends, supporters, readers and future collaborators!
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