Cardiff University Press’ review of 2023

Happy New Year to all our readers and followers!

2023 has been quite a varied year for CardiffUP, keeping us on our toes with new developments as well as achievements. We published our tenth monograph (it’s a big one) and started piloting a new publication process for conference proceedings volumes. Two brand-new titles were also added to our journal portfolio.

Here are some highlights of our last 12 months:

• In March 2023, we accepted Agoriad: a Journal of Spatial Theory and the European Journal of Microwave Energy for publication.
• In July, the Journal of Ammonia Energy published its first issue.
• In September, the European Journal of Microwave Energy website went live, with the Agoriad website following in December. Both are now accepting submissions for their inaugural issues.
• September also saw our monograph publishing programme reach double figures with the online publication of our tenth monograph, The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250-1600 by Ben Jervis et al.
• Over a seven-week period in the autumn, the editorial team of Martial Arts Studies achieved an indexing hat-trick, getting the journal listed for the first time in the Scopus, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and EBSCO databases.
• In November, JOMEC Journal was officially recognised as a Class A scientific journal by Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca (ANVUR), the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of University and Research Institutes.
• In December, Intersectional Perspectives became the third CardiffUP journal to be indexed in EBSCO, the first two being the Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture and Martial Arts Studies.

We expect 2024 to be a busy, fruitful year for both new monograph submissions and journal issues. If you’re interested in submitting your work for possible publication with us, please read the submission guidelines on our website and contact us with any queries you may have.

CardiffUP’s tenth monograph: The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250-1600

The Monograph Publishing Programme of Cardiff University Press was launched in 2019 and aimed to publish 2-3 Open Access monographs per year. We’ve succeeded in keeping to this schedule, publishing our tenth title in September 2023. The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250-1600 is authored by Ben Jervis (formerly Cardiff University, now University of Leicester), Chris Briggs (University of Cambridge), Alice Forward (University of Leicester), Tomasz Gromelski (University of Oxford) and Matthew Tompkins (University of Leicester).

The monograph provides a detailed examination of the possessions of non-elite rural households in medieval England.  Drawing on the results of the project “Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households, 1300-1600”, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, it represents the first national-scale interdisciplinary analysis of non-elite consumption in the later Middle Ages.

The research takes into account the rise in living standards in England following the Black Death, the commercialisation of the English economy and the timing of a “revolution” in consumer behaviour. Its focus on non-elite rural households is unusual. Considerable research has been done on the possessions of the great households and of people living in larger towns, but researchers have struggled to identify appropriate sources for understanding the possessions of those living in the countryside, even though they formed the majority of England’s population in medieval times. This monograph addresses the gap in understanding.

The study combines three sources of data to address two questions: what goods did medieval households own, and what influenced their consumption habits? The first source is archaeological evidence, comprising 14,706 objects recovered from archaeological excavations. The monograph collects together this data, much of which is unpublished and therefore inaccessible to researchers. The second dataset comes from lists of the seized goods of felons, outlaws and suicides collated by the Escheator, a royal official, in the 14^th and 15^th centuries. The Escheator’s work is poorly understood, but these lists, relating to some of the poorest people in medieval society (for whom traditional sources such as wills and probate inventories don’t exist), provide new insights into the living standards of rural households. The lists typically record and value the possessions of a household, meaning that it’s possible to present a quantitative analysis of non-elite consumption for the first time. The final dataset comes from equivalent lists compiled by the Coroner for the 16^th century. An interdisciplinary approach is essential, as many objects identified archaeologically don’t occur in the written records, and goods such as textiles don’t survive in the ground. Drawing these sources together therefore allows the presentation of a more comprehensive analysis of the possessions of medieval households. The possessions include kitchen equipment, tableware, furniture, clothing and personal items.

Discover this and other CardiffUP monographs at https://cardiffuniversitypress.org/site/books/ – free to read and download.

Cardiff University Press’ review of 2022

Happy New Year to all our readers and followers!

2022 has been another eventful year for CardiffUP, with some really encouraging new developments. We published three monographs in the space of five months – you can find out more about them in this post – and we accepted another one for publication later this year. We’ve also launched a new journal, the 13th title in our journal portfolio.

Here are some highlights of our last 12 months:

• Following an excellent response to the call for expressions of interest in membership of the CardiffUP Editorial Board last January, we welcomed nine new members in the first half of the year. Staff and students step down from the Board every now and then, as their careers develop and change – although we’re sorry to see them leave, opportunities then arise to refresh the membership. The different areas of specialist knowledge and experience that our new members have brought to the Board during 2022 are proving invaluable.
• The current sub-groups of the Board, one for monographs and the other for strategy and advocacy, have also been re-energised by the addition of two new members each.
• In May, we published our seventh monograph, The face-to-face principle: science, trust, democracy and the internet by Harry Collins et al.
• This was followed in August by our eighth one, Digital supply chain transformation: emerging technologies for sustainable growth, editedby Yingli Wang and Stephen Pettit.
• October saw the publication of our ninth monograph, Divine descent and the four world-ages in the Mahābhārata: or, why does the Kṛṣṇa avatāra inaugurate the worst yuga? by Simon Brodbeck.
• In September, we officially launched the Journal of Ammonia Energy (JAE)  at the 1^st Symposium on Ammonia Energy, hosted by Cardiff University. This is the first CardiffUP journal from the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and its inaugural issue is due for publication next May.
• Throughout the year, the Strategy and Advocacy sub-group of our Editorial Board has been improving the visibility of CardiffUP and building support for it within Cardiff University. This has been achieved by holding meetings with key stakeholders, organising exhibitor stands at conferences and other events on campus, exploring new funding and partnership opportunities, and informal networking.

We look forward to expanding our range of publications and developing CardiffUP further in 2023. If you’re interested in submitting your work for possible publication with us, please read the submission guidelines on our website and contact us with any queries you may have.

Recent monograph publications from Cardiff University Press

To mark International Open Access Week 2022 (24-30 October), this post features our latest three monographs, published during the last five months. Like all other CardiffUP publications, they’re open access: free to read and download via our website. And they have something else in common…

The Face-to-Face Principle: Science, Trust, Democracy and the Internet was published in May 2022. Its authors are Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Martin Innes, Eric B. Kennedy, Will Mason-Wilkes and John McLevey. They describe a modern global society where remote communication is replacing face-to-face (F2F) interaction in ways that could be disastrous for democracy and the idea of truth. The trust that F2F enables is contrasted with the “illusion of intimacy” created by remote communication. The monograph shows why F2F communication still matters, and why it’s essential for the survival of pluralist democracies.

Digital Supply Chain Transformation: Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Growth is an edited volume, published in August 2022 and edited by Yingli Wang and Stephen Pettit. Its contributing authors show how organisations can use emerging digital technologies for operational effectiveness, new capabilities and innovative business model development to transform their supply chains. Valuable insight is provided into how these technologies work and how to use them to create value for stakeholders by delivering sustainable supply chain outcomes.

Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata – or, Why Does the Kṛṣṇa Avatāra Inaugurate the Worst Yuga? by Simon Brodbeck was published on 12 October 2022. The Mahābhārata is one of the great epic poems of ancient India, written in Sanskrit. In its Hindu theology, divine descent is said to improve the world; but the Mahābhārata war, which the god Viṣṇu descends to effect, moves the world into its most dismal age (yuga). The monograph discusses that paradox, focusing on the roles of the suffering Earth and the ancient audiences.

At first glance, these three monographs seem to have few similarities. But one key aspect that unites them is their relevance to the great challenges and dangers of 21st-century Western society. Could they help us get closer to identifying solutions?

As The Face-to-Face Principle illustrates, virtual interactions dramatically increased at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with F2F communication becoming risky and restricted. Now that we’re building up defences against the virus, finding a balance between these two forms of communication isn’t straightforward. In the context of a rapidly-developing “new normal”, the monograph examines the crucial role that F2F communication plays in the preservation of trust, truth and democracy.

Digital Supply Chain Transformation was published in the aftermath of major disruption to UK and European supply chains and logistics. The causes of the disruption have included Brexit, Covid-19 restrictions, industrial action and the conflict in Ukraine. This edited volume indicates, however, that technology is already contributing to the solutions and will continue to do so.

The subject of Divine Descent is an epic poem, parts of which date from around 400 BCE, but it has more relevance to our modern world than we might anticipate. The monograph discusses passages of the Mahābhārata that describe a terrible war, the “suffering Earth” and the worst age in history: our own 21st-century experiences are disconcertingly similar. The theme of Open Access Week 2022 is “Open for Climate Justice”, making the publication of this newest CardiffUP monograph in the same month unexpectedly appropriate: the Mahābhārata’s personification of Earth suffering from the human weight placed on her is particularly poignant.

Discover these and other CardiffUP monographs at https://cardiffuniversitypress.org/site/books/

Cardiff University Press’ review of 2021

Happy New Year to all our readers and followers!

CardiffUP has continued to raise its profile and publish valuable original research outputs during 2021. The numerous challenges of the pandemic have often steered academics towards focusing more on teaching and less on research, but that didn’t prevent our hardworking journal editors from putting together this year’s high-quality volumes and issues. We’ve also launched a brand new journal and another is planned for next summer. The monograph publishing programme has been making very good progress, with another title published, two titles approved for publication and a further two in peer review by the end of 2021.

Here are some highlights of our last twelve months:

• In January, we completed our Annual Report and Future Vision document (copies available on request), looking back on the successes of 2019-20 and forward to what CardiffUP could potentially achieve in the next five years.
• Also in January, we decided to renew our Partner Press Agreement with online hosting platform provider Ubiquity Press for another three years.
• In February, we welcomed Claire Gorrara as a new member of the CardiffUP Editorial Board.
• In March, Cardiff University submitted its chosen publications for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 assessment, five of which had been published by CardiffUP.
• In April, the British Student Doctor Journal published its much-anticipated LGBTQ+ special issue. This guest post outlines the background to the issue.
• In June, we approved a new journal for publication, the forthcoming Journal of Ammonia Energy (JAE).
• In August, we published our sixth monograph, Educators of Healthcare Professionals: Agreeing a Shared Purpose by Julie Browne et al. Read more about the monograph in this guest post.
• In September, we approved two more monographs for publication in 2022.
• In October, we launched the student-led journal Intersectional Perspectives: Identity, Culture, and Society (IPICS), increasing our journal portfolio to 12 titles. Find out more about IPICS in this post.
• In November and early December, we redesigned the home page of our website, making it easier for everyone to keep track of the latest CardiffUP developments.

We look forward to publishing more monographs and journal articles in the coming year. If you’re interested in submitting your work for possible publication with us, please read the submission guidelines on our website and contact us with any queries you may have.

CardiffUP’s new monograph – Educators of Healthcare Professionals: Agreeing a Shared Purpose

This post is written by guest blogger Julie Browne, the lead author of the monograph.

Good teamwork is essential to good patient care and, as the COVID-19 crisis has shown, healthcare teams must be able to work together effectively, regardless of who’s on the team, the nature of the healthcare need or the setting.  A major effort is underway across higher education and the NHS to help healthcare staff learn interprofessional teamworking skills, but much more is needed. 

The authors of CardiffUP’s latest monograph turn the spotlight on the hidden players in all this – the educators themselves.  These teachers are found at all levels of the healthcare service, in all professions and specialities including academic and management settings, in clinical skills centres and GP surgeries.  How well are they trained and prepared to work with teachers from other specialities to facilitate the learning of multiprofessional groups of students, trainees and professionals? Disappointingly, the short answer is “hardly at all”.

Healthcare educators usually learn to teach people from their own profession. Their first teaching job is to mentor and supervise students and trainees from their own profession. They are appraised and rewarded only for their skills in teaching their own profession, and there is very little cross-over. They may not know much about how education works in other professions, and be unprepared for working in educational teams. So what does a radiography teacher have in common with a GP tutor or a nurse preceptor? Or a midwife trainer with a physiotherapy educator?

The authors of this book – themselves a multi-professional team – addressed this question by looking at the standards and guidance that 42 different professional groups set for the development and training of their educators to see what, if anything, they have in common. The short answer this time was “a great deal” – they share a wide range of generic skills and attitudes.  Nine central shared values and 24 activities were identified, after a research process involving hundreds of participants from over 20 healthcare professions. While each profession develops its students, trainees and practitioners in its own way, this book demonstrates conclusively that the fundamental work of the healthcare educator is broadly similar, regardless of clinical speciality or profession. This new insight provides solid academic and theoretical underpinning for multi-professional and interprofessional practice in healthcare education, and offers a new shared perspective on the future for healthcare education and healthcare educators.

Link to read and download the book free of charge

This book will be of interest to all senior educators, education commissioners and managers, other educators looking to improve their educational practice or further develop their careers and a wide range of students interested in educational practice and practices. The content is not only applicable to the United Kingdom but will be of value to many of those involved in the development of quality-based interprofessional education models around the world.

Malcolm Smith
Postgraduate Dental Dean
Health Education England North East

Promoting intersectionality with our new student-led journal

We at CardiffUP are very proud to announce the launch of our new journal, Intersectional Perspectives: Identity, Culture, and Society (IPICS), on 25 October 2021. Along with all our other publications, this is an Open Access title – so you can read and download the launch issue completely free of charge, without embargoes or other restrictions.

The launch is taking place virtually on the first day of International Open Access Week 2021, an annual celebration of the principles of Open Access. This year the theme of OA Week is “It matters how we open knowledge: building structural equity.” An introductory blog post from the organisers of the event states:

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion must be consistently prioritized year-round and integrated into the fabric of the open community, from how our infrastructure is built to how we organize community discussions to the governance structures we use.”

We’ve been improving our own level of compliance with this requirement since our first publications appeared online, and we’re committed to continuing to do so. We offer publishing opportunities to academics and students across the globe, regardless of how they identify themselves or what their protected group status is, and our publications frequently discuss topics related to disability, sexual orientation, sex, nationality and other protected characteristics. Here are some examples of these publications, including the special issue featured in our previous blog post in May:

• disability
• sexual orientation
• sex
• nationality

Intersectional Perspectives takes this commitment to diversity and inclusion one step further. Intersectionality can be defined as two or more forms of identity or protected characteristics interacting with each other, often creating new types of discrimination or social oppression as a result. The journal will bring intersectionality into the foreground, exploring the representation and construction of identity, sexuality, race and gender in social and cultural texts, discourses, practices and subjectivities, publishing articles that address how these markers of identity challenge or intersect with culture and society.

It’s one of four student-led journals in our journal portfolio, which means that it’s edited and managed by students. The Editor-in-Chief Arwa Al-Mubaddel, and her Associate Editors Beth Pyner and Ethan Evans, are all PhD students in Cardiff University’s School of English, Communication and Philosophy. They are supported and advised by experienced academic and Professional Services staff, some of whom sit on the journal’s Editorial Advisory Board.

Arwa, Beth and Ethan are currently looking to expand their editorial team, so if you’re interested in working for the journal, contact them at intersections@cardiff.ac.uk .

Find out more about the journal

Discover how to submit your work to CardiffUP

Feature: The British Student Doctor Journal vol. 5 no. 2

We’re very pleased to announce the publication of a particularly significant special issue of The British Student Doctor Journal. We’ve invited the issue’s guest editor, Callum Phillips, to tell us more about it here.

It is a pleasure to be writing this post introducing the LGBTQ+ Special Issue of The British Student Doctor Journal.

This issue has been over a year in the making, born from a frustration with the invisibility and discrimination faced as a non-binary medical student. I hope it will become a symbol of rebellion and queer power. It began with a scribble in a notebook – to platform, to inspire, to educate. The authors who have contributed to the issue represent a wide spectrum of identities and display the strength that lies in diversity. Their work is resonant and impactful, and I hope that they are extremely proud. The issue covers topics such as what doctors need to know about transgender healthcare, the representation of women who have sex with women, queering curriculums, and facilitation of sexual or gender identity disclosure, amongst many others. There are honest and powerful reflections addressing our history, our present, and our future.  

We know the NHS fails its queer patients and medical professionals; that medical education insufficiently addresses queer populations; that our institutions reflect the prejudices of society. It is my hope that we have met the three founding principles from my notebook, and this issue pushes ourselves a little further along the long road of addressing these failings. Queerness should not be relegated to the shadows, it should not have barriers placed in front of it, it is to be celebrated and encouraged.

The bespoke front cover is from an amazing queer artist called JanCarlo Caling. In it, he depicts the huge influence of the LGBTQIA+ community, including icons of varying race and body shapes, showing that there is no one way to be queer, and a refusal to be packaged into a neat label for societies’ comfort. We hope it pays tribute to the legacies of Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera, Audre Lorde, and Keith Haring; and celebrates more contemporary icons such as Jamie Windust, Chella Man, and Eddie Ndopa.

I hope that you enjoy reading the LGBTQ+ issue of the BSDJ as much as I have enjoyed its curation and construction. I would like to thank Cardiff University Press for the support we have received to carry out this important piece of work. You can contact me at cphillips@bsdj.org.uk or @medicallum on Twitter. 

Cardiff University Press’ review of 2020

Happy New Year to all our readers and followers!

As an online publisher, CardiffUP has found it relatively straightforward to move to 100% remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, although there have inevitably been a few challenges along the way. The publication processes for our journals and monographs have continued unabated.  Here are some highlights of our last twelve months:

• In January we launched our second Annual Report in infographic format.  We’ll be launching the third one shortly.
• In February the Chair of our Editorial Board, Paul Bowman, stepped down from the role.  The Board appointed two Co-Chairs in his place, Julie Browne and Mark Llewellyn.
• In March, along with most of our colleagues at Cardiff University, we started working from home because of the pandemic.
• In May we published our first volume of conference proceedings, Human Computer Interaction and Emerging Technologies: Adjunct Proceedings from the INTERACT 2019 Workshops, edited by Fernando Loizides et al.
• Also in May, one of the founding Co-Chairs of our Monograph Commissioning Panel, Ben Hannigan, stepped down from the role.  He was replaced as Co-Chair by Julian Brigstocke.
• In June the two new Editorial Board Co-Chairs agreed to take on oversight responsibilities for CardiffUP’s publication activities, with Julie focusing on journal titles and Mark on monograph titles.
• In July Mark was confirmed as a new member of the Monograph Commissioning Panel, in accordance with his additional responsibilities.
• Also in July, we approved a sixth monograph for publication, Educators of Healthcare Professionals: Agreeing a Shared Purpose by Julie Browne et al.  This is intended for publication in spring 2021.
• In November the journal New Readings was relaunched with issue 17(1), its first issue to be published under the CardiffUP imprint.
• Also in November, we published the long-awaited fourth CardiffUP monograph Reporting on Poverty: News Media Narratives and Third Sector Communications in Wales by Kerry Moore. The Welsh translation of this book, Adrodd ar Dlodi: Naratif y Cyfryngau Newyddion a Chyfathrebiadau’r Trydydd Sector yng Nghymru, was published simultaneously as our fifth monograph.

We’re delighted that some of the monographs and journal articles we’ve published in recent years will be submitted for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, demonstrating the excellent quality of academic research in Cardiff University and other higher education institutions across the UK. We look forward to publishing more monographs and articles in 2021: if you’d like to publish with us, please see our web pages for details.

Happy Open Access Week!

This week CardiffUP is celebrating all things Open Access.  International Open Access Week is an annual event, bringing together organisations and individuals from over 100 countries.  The 2020 event started on Monday 19^th October and will continue until Sunday 25^th October.

We celebrated last year’s event with the launch of our Monograph Publishing Programme.  The first two Open Access monographs to be published as part of the programme were prominently featured on the day – exactly one year ago this Friday, 23^rd October.  So it seems timely for us to provide an update of what’s been happening with the programme since then. 

The first two monographs were Deconstructing Martial Arts by Paul Bowman and Like Any Other Woman: the Lived Experience of Gynaecological Cancer by Jac Saorsa with Rebecca Phillips. They’ve been downloaded from our website more than 1,880 times altogether.  Like all Open Access publications, they’re freely available online to read and download – just follow the links.

In May 2020, we published our first volume of conference proceedings, Human Computer Interaction and Emerging Technologies: Adjunct Proceedings from the INTERACT 2019 Workshops.  This is an output of the 17^th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, organised by the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (IFIP TC13).  It contains nearly 50 papers by authors from all over the world, and has been compiled by an international team of co-editors.  This geographical diversity is a characteristic of the INTERACT conferences as a whole: in the words of the co-editors, “With an emphasis on inclusiveness, these conferences work to lower the barriers that prevent people in developing countries from participating in conferences. As a multidisciplinary field, HCI requires interaction and discussion among diverse people with different interests and backgrounds.” In less than six months, the complete volume has been downloaded over 800 times from our website, and single papers have been downloaded almost 750 times in total.

The next CardiffUP monograph is due to be published at the end of November 2020. Reporting on Poverty: News Media Narratives and Third Sector Communications in Wales and Adrodd ar Dlodi: Naratif y Cyfryngau Newyddion a Chyfathrebiadau’r Trydydd Sector yng Nghymru will be simultaneously published as English and Welsh language editions of the same text. Our first monograph for 2021 is Educators of Healthcare Professionals: Agreeing a Shared Purpose, which has been written by a team of Cardiff University and external authors.  We’re expecting several new monograph submissions during the next few months, so we anticipate that 2021 will be a busy year for our Monograph Publishing Programme.

(Cross-posted on our sister blog, Cardiff Open Access)