Thanks to a tip-off from Twitter, I've become aware of this interesting new publishing initiative, Open Book Publishers, based at Cambridge University and billed as a new approach to academic publishing. One of its guiding spirits is the economist Rupert Gatti, whose work on online markets I've admired.

Anyway, Open Book Publishers says it aims to address rising prices, and the difficulty of disseminating and publishing academic work. They've established a peer review process, and professional copyediting and proofreading. Authors retain full copyright; they are not charged for publication. Digital versions are freely available, copies can be purchased either wholly or by chapter for printing, and hard copies (using print-on-demand technology) have price tags of about £10/£25 for the paper and hardback versions – prices set for a not-for-profit outcome.

Economics doesn't feature in any of the early titles, but economists will be interested in both the business model, the implications of initiatives of this kind for the dissemination of knowledge and, perhaps, in submitting books!

I shall try to speak to one of the founders for a future post. Meanwhile, the website says the aim is to combine the benefits of Open Access, including searchability in Google Books, with selectivity and academic quality:

One particularly important development for academic publishing is
the emergence of the 'Open Access' (OA) initiatives, allowing free
access by all readers to digital content. The ideals of universal
access to scholarly output are very much in keeping with the aims of
academia – achieve the broadest dissemination of knowledge through
unrestricted use of research output. In addition a large proportion of
scholarly research is publicly funded, so it seems only reasonable that
its results are made as widely available as possible.

The 'vision' statement says too:

We also minimise the typically long publishing time of academic
books by speeding up the assessment and printing process of
manuscripts. In the longer run we believe that scholarly societies and
universities are best suited to ensure the scholarly quality of
published works. To that end we foster publishing collaborations with
academic societies and academic institutions willing to develop their
own monograph series and welcome enquiries from any such organisation.