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Palgrave Macmillan 2020: Celebrating purpose, passion and transformation in HSS publishing

 



This month marks 20 years since Palgrave Macmillan revived the Palgrave name, continuing a long tradition of publishing the leading thinkers in the humanities, social sciences and business. Today, Palgrave Macmillan publishes more than 2,200 books and 50 journals every year and is the leading imprint in Springer Nature’s humanities and social science portfolio.


Building on an illustrious list of publications across its more than 175 year Macmillan heritage — including The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, The Statesman’s Yearbook and The British General Election series — Palgrave Macmillan publishes books, journals and major reference works across a wide spectrum of disciplines, with a focus on promoting interdisciplinarity. 


The academic publisher has honoured its progessive roots and with bold initiatives in recent years. The Palgrave Pivot format, launched in 2012, is a boundary-breaking mid-length format which allows authors to swiftly and flexibly publish mid-length works (25,000 to 50,000 words), while maintaining high editorial standards and maximising impact. Palgrave Pivot titleFukushima by David Elliott won the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013 and The Four Faces of the Republican Party and the Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nominationhas more references, citations and media mentions than any other Palgrave book. Pivots remain one of Palgrave Macmillan’s most popular formats with more than 1,500 published since the launch.


Eager to serve the academic community in new ways, Palgrave Macmillan launched its Palgrave Open programme in 2013. It was one of the first publishers to offer an open access option for HSS and the first major publisher to offer CC BY for OA books. Its first open access monograph, funded by the Wellcome Trust, was Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States, 1850-2000by Dr Aya Homei and Professor Michael Worboys. Other notable OA titles include The Academic Book of the Future, Digital Kenya and European Citizenship After Brexit. Palgrave Macmillan continues to publish OA books alongside fellow imprints Springer and Apress as part of the widerSpringer Nature Open Access books programme, which this year celebrated the publication of its 1000th OA book.


Christina M. Brian, Vice President of Business, Economics, Politics & Law Books, said: ‘I’m incredibly proud to have worked for Palgrave Macmillan for more than 10 years and to witness how much we’ve continued to evolve. We’re using our celebrations this year to highlight three key elements of our publishing: our purpose of publishing high-impact interdisciplinary research that makes a difference; the passion of our global community of staff, series editors and authors; and the transformation and innovation we have experienced and inspired in Humanities and Social Science publishing over the years.’ 


Niels Peter Thomas, Managing Director for Books at Springer Nature, said: ‘The Macmillan and Palgrave families could only have dreamed of the incredible work we’d still be doing in 2020. If they could see us now, more than 175 years after they published their first books, they would surely be proud of the impact our Humanities and Social Science research is continuing to have on the world. The progressive spirit of Palgrave lives on in the work we’re doing and we’re very excited to see what the next 20 years will bring.’


In honour of the celebration Palgrave Macmillan will be hosting a virtual inaugural lecture on 23rd September: Palgrave Macmillan 2020: Celebrating purpose, passion and transformation. It is free and open to the public and anyone interested in attending can sign up here.

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