Five minutes with LSE Press

Elinor Potts, Communications Coordinator, tells us all about LSE Press, their successes and what to look out for from the Press in 2024 and beyond.

Tell us about LSE Press

LSE Press was founded in 2018 in line with the ethos of our institution, to understand the causes of things and for the betterment of society. Open publishing accords with LSE’s role as the global convenor of influential debates on critical issues in society.

As Communications Coordinator for the Press, I work with my team to promote awareness and access to our free to read and download books and journals through marketing and publicity strategies, tailored to respective audiences of readers. The LSE Press team consists of our Managing Director, Niamh Tumelty; our new Chair of Editorial Board, Professor Sarah Worthington; Managing Editor, Alice Park; and Scholarly Communications Officer Lucy Lambe.

Last November, LSE Press celebrated 5 years of publishing, so we’ve been doing a lot of reflection about our aims and values as we move forward and build our publication list. As Professor Sarah Worthington and Professor Patrick Dunleavy recently shared in an interview for the LSE Review of Books, “we want to ensure that research is presented to readers in the most accessible, robust and compelling way possible, on user-friendly digital publishing platforms.”

One of our most downloaded books is Advanced Macroeconomics: An Easy Guide, by Filipe Campante, Federico Sturzenegger and Andrés Velasco. This open access textbook has been downloaded over 50,000 times and is a valuable resource for any Masters level course in economics with a focus on policymaking. Produced from the authors’ experience teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School, they also made their teaching materials open access to accompany the text.

This year, we published 5 books – Spectrum Auctions by Geoffrey Myers, How Africa Trades, edited by David Luke, Decentralised Governance, edited by Jean-Paul Faguet and Sarmistha Pal, How Did Britain Come to This? by Gwyn Bevan, and Ukraine: Russia’s War and the Future of the Global Order, edited by Mick Cox.

Alongside this, our journals published new special issues and papers, with Economia LACEA Journal flipping to open access with us at the beginning of the year, as well as the new Philosophy of Physics journal publishing their first round of papers in November 2023, plus special issues from the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, LSE Public Policy Review, and the continued growth of the Journal of Long-Term Care.  

One of our many highlights of 2023 has been our launch event for How Did Britain Come to This? by Gwyn Bevan which was held on campus at LSE. The recording has now reached over 224,000 hits (and counting!) on YouTube.

We also held a brilliant book launch for How Africa Trades, where we collaborated with the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE. The event consisted of a book panel discussion, followed by a fashion show, music, and stalls from makers, in celebration of Africa Day. The book was extracted in Africa Business magazine, and the Editor wrote a fantastic piece for The Banker magazine published in the Financial Times.  

What can you tell us about future plans at LSE Press?

So far, we have announced 3 books publishing in 2024, with more still to be announced. These are Dead Men’s Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies, by Terhi Rantanen, Australia’s Evolving Democracy: The 2024 Australian Democratic Audit, edited by Mark Evans, Patrick Dunleavy and John Phillimore, and Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox, by Naila Kabeer.

From 2024, LSE Press will also be publishing the prestigious Royal Geography Society monograph series, formerly published by Wiley. All future books will be published fully open access and the first LSE Press titles will publish in Autumn 2024.

Keep an eye on our newsletter for updates on book launches and access to early review copies.

Why does open institutional publishing matter? 

Our Managing Director Niamh Tumelty considers this question in her recent interview for the LSE Press blog, where she says, “open access publishing is critical because it gives free access to publicly funded research to anyone that wants to access it and/or build on it in through their own research.”

Niamh makes the point that, “open access is the best way of sharing work – which researchers put so much time and energy in to – with the widest possible audience. This is very much in line with the LSE’s 2030 Shape The World strategy and its role in influencing what’s happening globally through leading the social sciences.

Publishing via closed access means research can only be accessed by a tiny number of researchers in wealthier institutions and countries. Closed access also means you limit the capacity of your research to truly make a difference. It’s astounding that we ever got ourselves into a situation where it was so closed!”

Where can we find out more about LSE Press?

LSE Press books and journals can be found on our website.

We publish regularly on our blog, and update our listing page with forthcoming events here as well.

We’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and we keep our Linktree up to date with new reviews of our titles. We’ve also joined Bluesky and Threads.

To keep in the loop on our new publications, we also have a quarterly newsletter where we share updates on all of the above, you can subscribe here.