UCL Press

Summary

UCL Press is the first open access university press in the United Kingdom. It currently publishes more than 50 books and 14 academic journals in open access each year, in addition to supporting UCL’s (University College London) student journals program.

All open access books and journals can be freely downloaded in PDF format or read online from anywhere in the world.

In line with UCL’s principles, it is believed that research should be available to everyone without restrictions.

The press also offers a free service for UCL students who wish to create an open access journal. To this end, it provides the tools for students to independently manage and publish a fully open access journal, free of charge, using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) hosting service.

Promoting organizations

UCL Press was established and launched by University College London (UCL) in 2015, becoming the first open access university press in the United Kingdom. The university itself funds and manages the press, integrating it into its institutional strategy for research and education.

UCL’s support ensures the sustainability of the project as well as its alignment with the university’s values: a commitment to research excellence, inclusive education, and the global dissemination of knowledge. In this way, the press serves as a strategic instrument of UCL to promote open science and to strengthen the social and academic impact of its research output.

Objectives

UCL Press sets itself the goal of being recognized as one of the world’s leading open access publishers and, to this end, pursues the following objectives:

Publish high-quality and cutting-edge research outputs.
Achieve the widest possible global reach and impact for its publications and foster worldwide public engagement.
Support the field of scholarly publishing through practice, training, research, and data sharing.
Represent key academic research interests, with particular attention to the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Support early-career researchers by publishing their first works.
Maintain a strong commitment to research and publishing ethics.
Demonstrate a commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion across all activities.
Promote the integration of research and education in the press’s outputs.
Share UCL’s commitment to sustainability.

Beneficiaries and stakeholders

In the first instance, by publishing in open access, authors achieve:

Greater use, visibility, and impact.
The possibility of reaching marginalized regions and communities that would otherwise not have access to their work.
Making research results available to everyone through a free and unrestricted online access system.

In the second instance, since UCL Press is subsidized by UCL, the university itself gains significant impact, while at the same time the wider scientific community benefits from the increased volume of open access research, thereby improving access to knowledge.

Results

By publishing a variety of open access journals on a wide range of topics in the humanities and social sciences, UCL Press reaches a broad spectrum of readers.

The platforms it uses to reach these potential readers are:

UCL Discovery
JSTOR
OAPEN
Baobab Ebooks
Google Play
World Reader
Google Books

Challenges

In the early stages of establishing UCL Press, it became clear that it was necessary to simultaneously handle a large number of authors, proposals, and support within the university, while also shaping the business plan, building the infrastructure, and recruiting staff.

Evidence of success

Since its launch in 2015, UCL Press has established itself as a global benchmark in open access university publishing, with more than 21 million downloads across 242 countries and territories, and a catalogue of over 400 books and 15 academic journals. These results demonstrate the viability of a university publishing model based on open access, capable of achieving sustained global impact.

The potential for transfer lies in several elements that can be adapted by other universities and institutions:

Institutional funding that ensures sustainability and aligns publishing activity with the academic mission.
Multichannel dissemination (UCL Discovery, JSTOR, OAPEN, Google Books, among others) that maximizes visibility and usage.
Transparency in impact indicators through a public statistics portal.
Innovation in teaching, through open access textbooks and educational resources.

Flagship cases such as How the World Changed Social Media (with more than 930,000 downloads) illustrate the potential visibility and citability of open access monographs. This modular and scalable model can be replicated in different institutional contexts to drive the transition toward a more open, efficient, and sustainable publishing system.