Please note that our site uses cookies to provide basic functionality and feedback. By continuing to use our site you accept this use. More information is provided in our [privacy page](/policies/privacy).

large_obp-cover-placeholder.jpg

medium_obp-cover-placeholder.jpg

small_obp-cover-placeholder.jpg

thumbnail_obp-cover-placeholder.jpg

obp-cover-placeholder.jpg

favicon.png

Open Book Publishers

**{{institution}}** is supporting Open Book Publishers and provides you with free ebook downloads and discounted prices for all our titles.

# Testimonials

We're a scholar-led, non-profit open access press. We were founded by academics who wanted to make the best research freely and widely available, so all our books are published in high-quality open access editions as well as affordable paperback, hardback, and ebook editions, and **we don't charge authors to publish with us**.

We publish monographs, edited collections, and textbooks, as well as [technically innovative projects](/publish-with-us/innovative-books). We [rigorously peer review](/information-for-new-authors/the-review-process) any manuscript before we publish it. Our books win [prizes](/publish-with-us/awards-and-prizes) and are widely read and reviewed: we want to make sure that brilliant academic books are readily available and easily accessed across the world.

Rad the testimonials below to hear from some of our authors, and from journals who have commented on our work as a press. You can also find reviews and testimonials for individual books on their home page via the [catalogue](/books).

Emeritus Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford

In a lifetime of working with publishers in one capacity or another, I have never encountered any like OBP.

In my individual collaborations with you all, you have been perceptive, tireless, accommodating, sensitive, and just a real pleasure to work with. It is pretty much six months to the day since I heard from Alessandra that the manuscript I had submitted to OBP had been accepted for publication. To get from that stage to this in so short a time is quite exceptionally fast, and requires dedication and efficiency of the highest order; but to have at the end of it a book in both digital and print formats, with such high quality of production and already being talked about across the world, is simply off the scale. I don't have the words to say how impressed, and deeply grateful, I am. 

Leiden University, the Netherlands

Right from the start I felt that OBP was the right publisher for me. Not only because their books are freely available; not only because they make their publications available in various formats; not only because they make enriched publications possible; not only because they have a very professional attitude towards the whole production and PR process, etc. No, why I felt ‘at home’ with OBP is because of the personal contact, their engagement, their openness and inventiveness – in short, a perfect combination of professionalism and cordiality. 

UWC-USA, New Mexico

The world of publishing can be incredibly daunting for a first-time book author. Before coming across OBP, I recall waiting weeks or months at a time simply to receive an acknowledgment from publishing houses; often being ultimately met with not-so-constructive responses about the project. Working with OBP has been completely refreshing: timely responses; feedback that is both helpful and respectful of the author's voice; open-access ideals that are incredibly important in an academic arena that, more often than not, excludes rather than shares. It has been a privilege working with OBP and I am so very glad that my first book has found its home here. 

University of California, Berkeley

I'm really impressed with the professional quality of the editing and copyediting [of Reading Backwards]—much more thorough than many a university press! 

author of A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt

I am delighted at my book’s having now appeared and wish to thank you most warmly for taking me on and responding in such a friendly and welcoming way. Working together with you—indeed with all the production team—has been a joy. The end product looks magnificent. I just hope that readers will also find the content of value. The OBP publishing ideal is much to be welcomed and is undoubtedly the way of the future that will in time be followed by old-established publishers. It has enabled monographs that would otherwise not easily be published to reach a wide public, who can be assured that the works are of quality through the peer-review process.

Public Health University of Arizona

Just a quick note to say thank you to you and your colleagues for a smooth and efficient editorial and production process on my book. The whole team have been wonderfully professional, upbeat and flexible in all aspects from start to finish. You have a happy author. Please accept my special gratitude for agreeing to take on this project, and for the good work you are doing at OBP.

independent author

OBP turns out beautiful volumes, beautiful with respect to both typography and illustrations. And it works swiftly. Production takes place in maximum consultation and cooperation with the author. I have found the editors knowledgeable, skillful, and forbearing. And finally, working with Roger Paulin has been a privilege and a gift. In effect, OBP has offered invaluable support to my efforts.

University of St Andrews

The physical copy of Nora's book has just come through my door, to my delight, so this is a good moment to say how much I have appreciated your efficiency, professionalism, courtesy and SPEED and what a pleasure it has been working with you. Thank you.

Author of Plato's 'Republic': An Introduction

You have a wonderful staff at OBP: everyone I've dealt with has been supportive, friendly, efficient, and helpful. You all have managed to make what could be a nerve-wracking experience into a remarkably pleasant and stress-free one.  It's been a real treat working with you.

University of Oxford

On behalf of the Creative Multilingualism Team, I should like to thank you very much indeed for all your expertise, advice, flexibility, responsiveness and hard work on our volume! We’re delighted with it. It constitutes an ideal embodiment of our 4-year research project, and we’re enormously grateful to you for having enabled us to bring it to fruition in this beautiful form.

University of Toronto

In the last 50 years, academic publishing has been invaded by for-profit businesses.  Academics donate their research and their refereeing services to these companies, who then lock up the research and sell it back to the academy at prices that are usually high and sometimes stratospheric.  Appalled by this invasion, in the mid-2000s I was a member of a group of economic theorists that founded an Open Access journal, Theoretical Economics, and I served as the editor of that journal for several years.  I remain devoted to the principle that academic research should be freely available, and am delighted that Open Book Publishers is publishing 'Models in Microeconomic Theory'.

City College of New York

I'm convinced that open access is the future of academic publishing.  I hadn't expected that the process would be as disciplined or that the product would be as elegant. I wish all my previous books had been published this way.

Harvard University

The team there is phenomenal. In decades of writing books I have never dealt with people in publishing who have been as unfailingly capable and nice.

Open Book Publishers has been the ideal collaborator for Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy. The OBP team has been impeccable throughout, with meticulous editing, helpful suggestions, and continual support through the process, including in helping us to achieve our ambitious publishing timeline. I can hardly believe that less than a year after the completion of the lecture series, OBP has published all the thirty-four chapters in three beautiful volumes. I do believe that the project as a whole has the potential to have a significant impact on Dante Studies and on lay appreciation of the poem, but it the open platform model of OBP which gives the greatest chance of making this a reality. Thank you!

Chapman University

OBP is a real beacon of sanity and kindness in this murky world of digital publishing. My positive experience publishing with OBP made me an enthusiastic convert, and has emboldened me to the experiment of making the Journal of Icon Studies open access. OBP were so generous and helpful as we struggled to come to terms with the implications of licensing the journal. We took their advice and went with the most liberal CC BY license, and it seems that the tide is turning strongly in this direction of maximum openness. 

University of Liverpool

I was really pleased with the work that you all did on mine and Paul’s book (Just Managing?). Very professional, very attentive to detail and in the end a very good product.

Birkbeck, University of London

I can say, without a shred of doubt, that my experience with Open Book Publishers has been nothing short of excellent. For reference/comparison: I’ve published three other books with Cambridge UP, Bloomsbury and Palgrave. In all respects, OBP were at least as good, if not better in some areas, than some of the others. A few areas are worth commenting upon:

1. The peer-review was excellent in terms of both rigour and speed. It was relatively quick and they kept me informed throughout when one of the reviewers asked for a deadline extension. When I did receive the reports (of which there were three—more than on any of my other books)—the feedback was constructive and clearly from people who knew the field.

2. Production. This was another great experience. The copyediting was done by an academic (I think she is a postdoc at Cambridge) and was extremely thorough. It was also done in a timely fashion. Cover designs and typeset proofs were also extremely quick. Finally, the whole thing will be out this/next week. I only delivered the final manuscript last month. It is fantastic not to have to wait ages for a book to be published.

3. Prices. Paperback at £16 and free PDF online. Can’t really beat that.

I managed to get Birkbeck to fund the costs of publication and I don’t regret it at all. I’d publish with them again.

Princeton

I have excellent memories of an outstanding (and exacting) copy-editor at Harvard, from whom I learned much, and an extremely helpful and co-operative editor at Chicago, but nowhere have I encountered the degree of responsiveness, the generous support, the personal engagement of the founder-editors of Open Book Publishers—themselves university teachers—and their staff. I have now published four books with this press and in each case, communication among us was frequent, easy, open, and produced results. At a time when it is easy to be cynical about university presses and the way they are fulfilling—or not fulfilling—the objectives for which they were originally set up, Open Book is a beacon of optimism, encouragement, and confidence in the value and future of scholarly inquiry, writing, and exchange. It is high time that university appointment and tenure committees, university libraries, and scholarly journals recognized the role this adventurous and innovative not-for-profit press is playing, especially in the humanities, and that its procedures for the selection of manuscripts submitted to it are as rigorous as those of any university press. I believe that Open Book Publishers is the way of the future in scholarly publishing. It is already expanding rapidly and I am glad to see that. Still, selfishly, I hope that expansion will not erode the feeling those who have worked with it have of being part of a family of scholars, rather than a business.

King's College, Cambridge

 Open Book has enabled me to experiment with a new genre: textbooks on classical authors that enable research-led teaching at school level. The key factor to make this work is speed: because these books are written in reaction to examination boards setting new texts from time to time, the turn-around between initial impulse and final product is, ideally, under a year. OBP has risen magnificently to this challenge. World-class readers who operate at the speed of light vet the final drafts (sixteen pages of detailed comments on a manuscript of 300+ pages within three days, anybody?), before the production team works its own magic, transforming the manuscripts into beautiful volumes within six weeks.

University of Western Australia

 From initial proposal submission to final delivery of the manuscript, Open Book Publishers was a pleasure to work with. Time is of the essence when publishing in a field as fast-moving as the digital humanities, but scholarly publishing is typically a tortuously slow process. OBP was a welcome surprise, whose swift and efficient processes ensured timely publication without ever sacrificing quality or scholarly rigour. The comprehensive peer review was efficiently coordinated within a matter of two months. In a publishing world where many presses no longer bother with anything beyond "light" copy-editing, OBP enlisted three copy-editors to pore over the manuscript. Direct correspondence with the design and production teams guaranteed that everyone was pleased with the final result. With all this added attention, the entire process took less time than any other academic publishing project I've ever worked on. Best of all, the whole book is available to read for free online, allowing a global readership to access and critically engage with our work, while simultaneous publication in print satisfies the requirements of even the most hardened tenure and promotion committees. I wholeheartedly recommend publishing with Open Book Publishers.

New York University

 Open Book Publishers works just like the most distinguished academic publishers—except, that is, for making scholarship available to a vastly larger audience. The review process for my book was just as stringent as that which my previous books have undergone from Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses. I received critical reports from two anonymous referees who were clearly expert in my field. OBP worked closely with me on the design for the book, with splendid results. Their production process was efficient and far quicker than that of a traditional publisher. The number of readers who have accessed the book in the six months since publication is already four times the sales of my previous book, which was published in 2009.

University of California, San Diego

From the time I sent in my manuscript, the editors at Open Book Publishers responded quickly and respectfully. While it took some months for the outside reader reports, OPB quickly thereafter offered to accept the MS for publication. From that point on I worked with them in a collegial and collaborative atmosphere to prepare the final text. From the graphic designs of the front and back covers, to the manner in which photos and links were to be displayed in the text, there was a very creative interaction to come up with the best possible presentation. The actual editing was also a matter of cooperating to produce a clear scholarly work, with the electronic manuscript being sent back and forth in a timely fashion through several phases of proofreading. Finally, our collaboration with the World Oral Literature Project not only placed the book in an exciting new series but also enabled us to create links to the subtitled videos of the narrative performances that I had analyzed, a nearly unique innovation that augmented the depth of the project. Throughout, my experience was one of working with enthusiastic colleagues who understood the production process and the importance of making solid scholarship available to the widest possible readership. Compared to interactions I’ve had with other academic and private presses, Open Book was a deeply appreciated breath of fresh air.

Testimonials from Authors

Our books are regularly reviewed in publications, academic journals and scholarly blogs including *The Times Literary Supplement*, *Times Higher Education*, *Essays in Criticism*, *Modern Language Review*, *Choice Review*, *Romanticism*, *The Year’s Work in English Studies / The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory*, *Medieval Aevum*, *The English Historical Review*, *International Studies in the Philosophy of Science*, *Journal of European Studies*, *Slavic and East European Journal*, and *Counterfire*. 

You can find links to reviews and awards on the individual title pages in [our catalogue](/books), and a list of [our prize-winning books](/publish-with-us/awards-and-prizes). Our press is also positively reviewed in journals, and you can see some examples below.

Georgia Institute of Technology, The Medieval Review, 21.12.02

Jan Ziolkowski’s patient and ground-breaking effort encourages us to pay more attention to the benevolent and less sensational examples of modern receptions of the medieval. His books, freely accessible as they are via OpenBook publishers in .pdf and online versions (https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/697), are decades ahead of an academic industry still mostly wed to print and to prices that are sustainable only for the richest university libraries and independently wealthy individuals.

Folk Music Journal (2022): 110-11

An excellent feature of the book is the extensive use of references to online video material, including the use of QR codes to make access easier. At a time when academic book prices have become excessive, it is pleasing to note that this book is available as a free PDF online, as well as for purchase at a reasonable price.

Ornithology Section, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, 'A Great Service to African Conservation Science', Conservation Biology, 20 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13879

The book, published by Open Book Publishers, is freely available in pdf format. The decision of the authors to make the book open access is highly commendable and makes it of major importance to biodiversity conservation in Africa by Africans. [...] Free distribution ensures a wide readership among African environmental scholars, researchers, and other practitioners. 

Testimonials

Testimonials from Authors

Testimonials from Journals