February has been a really exciting, and busy, month at UCL Press, we’ve published a brand new online resource, Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine, and 4 more titles – across the built environment, literature, popular culture and heritage studies fields. For more information on all of these publications, and links to their free content, please keep reading.

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine
Edited by Dr Anas Zyada and Professor David Walker

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine is hosted on our innovative, open access online content platform, and developed in collaboration leading practitioners at UCL’s Centre for Perioperative Medicine. It explores clinically relevant issues, offers authoritative guidance and provides a wide variety of learning opportunities for both students and practising clinicians in perioperative medicine, by experts and practitioners from all over the world.

Each succinct, peer-reviewed, clinical case study is written in a comprehensible and engaging style and focuses on a single question, prefaced with a brief case history, providing a clinical context to the question being answered. Included within the case studies will be an opportunity for readers to interact with links, images, infographics and short videos, to improve knowledge retention and reader understanding.
Access the case studies and all associated resources for free

Re-Writing Language
How Literary Texts Can Promote Inclusive Language Use
Christiane Luck

Inclusive language remains a hot topic. Despite decades of empirical evidence and revisions of formal language use, many inclusive adaptations of English and German continue to be ignored or contested. But how to convince speakers of the importance of inclusive language? Rewriting Language provides one possible answer: by engaging readers with the issue, literary texts can help to raise awareness and thereby promote wider linguistic change.
Download for free

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America
Edited by James Scorer

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America is a cutting-edge study of the expanding worlds of Latin American comics. The book demonstrates the importance of studying how comics circulate in all manner of ways beyond print media. It also reminds us of the need to think about the creative role of comics in societies with less established comics markets than in Europe, the US and Asia.
Download for free

Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe
Edited by Udo Grashoff

Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe brings together historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, urban planners and political activists to break new ground in the globalisation of knowledge about informal housing. Providing both methodological reflections and practical examples, they compare informal settlements, unauthorised occupation of flats, illegal housing construction and political squatting in different regions of the world. Subjects covered include squatter settlements in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, squatting activism in Brazil and Spain, right-wing squatting in Germany, planning laws and informality across countries in the Global North, and squatting in post-Second World War UK and Australia.
Download for free

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage
Construction, Transformation and Destruction
Edited by Veysel Apaydin

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.
Download for free

UCL Press Journals

We’re pleased to announce that 4 of our journals have been accepted into the DOAJ – Directory of Open Access Journals. This gives our authors even greater exposure and makes it easier for our readers to find all openaccess articles

These journals are now indexed in DOAJ: Architecture_MPS, Radical Americas, Europe and the World: A law review and International Journal of Social Pedagogy (IJSP).

To find out more about the 8 Open Access journals we publish, and to download any of their recent content, take a closer look here.

Often there is more than research inside the books we read. Bookmarks, train tickets, receipts, and menus tucked into pages offer clues about the life of the book itself. Yet the lives of our research material often go unmarked, lost between the gaps in disciplinary boundaries and narrow definitions. The biographies of books and documents can illuminate their contexts, as printed matter that is sold, passed down or abandoned. What happens when we consider the three moments of production, transmission, and reception together with our own research stories? Documents, like people, have births, lives, and even deaths, so what does it mean to investigate the biographies of texts, objects, and archival records? Beyond the formal roles of cataloguing and archiving, what part do researchers play in shaping the emergent archive?

This is not strictly an intellectual history, nor even a material book history, but something more like a social history of ideas, inspired by work such as Antoinette Burton’s discussions of Archive Stories (Duke University Press, 2005), Arlette Farge’s reflection on the Allure of the Archives (Yale University Press, 2013), Lisa Jardine’s discussion of Temptation in the Archives (UCL Press, 2015), and Ann Laura Stoler’s call to read Along the Archival Grain (Princeton University Press, 2009). Indeed, the stories of our research material evolve significantly over their life cycles, as Arjun Appadurai outlined in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge University Press, 1986). Beyond commodities and value, however, this new publication seeks to consider our affective relationship with research material, juxtaposing critical histories with reflections on practice.

The editorial board invite contributors to submit papers to be published in a BOOC (Book as Open Online Content), a fully open access platform with UCL Press described as “a living book”. We are interested in a broad geographical and chronological scope and actively welcome a diverse range of topics and authors.

We will look to publish material in four streams, which will allow us to set fully REF compliant academic work alongside work produced by practitioners for their professional development:

• Research Stories (8-10,000 words): We are encouraging a focus on research stories to invite a more reflective methodology, offering a more inclusive and engaged commentary on the work involved in researching, ordering, and preserving the past. This section will consist of double-blind peer-reviewed academic articles.
• Co-Production (flexible word count): Outputs from projects in which non-academic, undergraduate and taught postgraduate audiences collaborate with others (collection professions, academics, members of the public etc) to create new work that is based on research collections.
• Collection Profiles (500 words): This stream consists of shorter, descriptive or even narrative pieces, that highlights items or collections of interest. This may be a prelude to a piece of in-depth research, but it does not necessarily need to be.
• Engagement (2,000 words): Reflective pieces that focus on a broad range of engagement activities, from the professional’s perspective. These can be case studies, or ‘think pieces’ on particular skills or techniques.  They should inform professional practice.

Please send in proposals for publications in these streams, along with a brief biographical presentation. All are welcome!

For submissions and any questions, please contact the lead editor, Dr Andrew WM Smith (University of Chichester) –  a.smith@chi.ac.uk

We are delighted to announce new content, published as part of the Academic Book of the Future BOOC. Published to coincide with Peer Review Week, Peer Review in Practice examines all aspects of peer review.

Peer Review in Practice was originally published in beta version during Peer Review Week 2016. It was the first stage in a mini-project focusing on peer review as part of the broader Academic Book of the Future project, and reviews the existing literature of peer review, and builds models for understanding traditional and emerging peer review practices.

Find out more here.

UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of The Academic Book of the Future. View it online for free: https://goo.gl/dbLS2N

This dynamic, innovative, evolving and open platform publishes contributions connected to the AHRC/British Library project, The Academic Book of the Future, which has been investigating key aspects of scholarly publishing for the last two years, led by a team of academics from UCL and Kings College London. The platform, which presents the content in the form of a BOOC (Books as Open Online Content), will grow as more content is created, and will allow different ways to explore and share the ideas and discussions.

Authors from all areas of the academic, publishing, bookselling and library communities discuss aspects of scholarly books and their possible futures: for example, the role of the editor, peer review, academic bookshops and libraries, open access, digital publishing and technology. The content – in a range of peer-reviewed formats including videos, blogs, chapters and reports – presents a fascinating variety of insights into the constantly evolving contexts of the academic book and will be of interest to anyone working in the HE sector and the publishing industry, and, indeed, to anyone interested in how ideas are disseminated to a wider general audience.

Content now available includes:

• Introduction to Academic Book of the Future  Samantha J. Rayner
• Open Access Book Publishing and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Theoretical Approach to a Description of the slow scalability of Open Access Book Publishing  Marcel Knöchelmann
• The Academic Book of the Future and Its Readers: Issues and Opportunities of Onscreen Reading Silvia Pirola
• Academic Book Discovery, Evaluation and Access: A Report  Anna Faherty
• The Academic Book in the South: Conference Report Stephanie Kitchen
• The (Open) Academic Book of the Future  Sarah Lippincott
• American Mathematical Society: Publishing Maths in the USA Robert Harrington
• What is the Point of the Academic Book? Part One  Rebecca Lyons
• What is the Point of the Academic Book? Part Two  Mari Shullaw
• What is the Future for the Academic Book?  Sussex Research Hive
• The Future of the Academic Book in the USA  Amy Brand, Anne Brackenbury, Robert Harington, Sarah Lippincott and moderated by Sheila Bond
• My Acts of Reading  Andrew Prescott
• Students and the Digital Edition: A Polemic  Stephen Gregg
• Open Access and Academic Publishing  Ian Lovecy
• Open Access: A Personal Take  Alastair Horne
• Towards an Ethics of Circulation: A Manifesto in Tweets Haidy Geismar
• Creative Writing Theses: Discoverability and Open Access Rebecca Lyons
• What is the Future for the Academic Book? BSECS 2016 Storify
• Github notes on What is the Future for the Academic Book? James Baker
• The Academic Book in the South (Storify)
• What is the Point of the Academic Book? BSECS Panel Storify
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations Paul Moore
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations Catherine Grant
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations Karen Savage
• Lincoln’s [Im]Possible Constellations Mikey Murray
• Publishers Address the Academic Book of the Future Amy Brand, Anne Brackenbury, Robert Harington, Sarah Lippincott and moderated by Sheila Bond
• What is the Future for the Academic Book? – Video recording of a panel Caroline Basset, Kiren Shoman, Martin Eve
• Academic Publishing in the South: The Ghanaian Experience Akoss Ofori-Mensah
• New Directions, New Models  Abhijit Gupta and Padmini Ray Murray
• Panel Discussion: Academic Authorship and Knowledge Production Stephanie Kitchen, Insa Nolte & Padmini Ray Murray
• Panel Discussion: The Role of Libraries and Archives Gillian Evison, Francis Gotto & James Lowry
• Final Panel Discussion & Concluding Comments Ola Uduku
• Panel: The Role of Libraries and Archives Nureldin Satti
• The Academic Book of the Future Project Film
• Panel: Academic Authorship and Knowledge Production Sari Hanafi