UCL Press hits one million book downloads milestone

UCL Press, the UK's first fully Open Access University Press, has announced that one million copies of its books have been downloaded around the world. The announcement comes as the publisher celebrates its third anniversary since launching in 2015. Its academic books - which feature monographs, edited collections and textbooks - have reached readers in 222 of a possible 223 countries and territories, giving readers in nations as far afield as North Korea and Haiti access to important academic research. While traditionally published scholarly monographs sell an average of 250 copies per title, UCL Press's Open Access monographs are downloaded free-of-charge approximately 12,500 times per title. This provides unequivocal evidence that publishing academic content via Open Access is the most effective way to reach a wider, more diverse and global audience. The most popular title in the UCL Press list to date is How the World Changed Social Media by UCL Professor of Anthropology Daniel Miller and a collective of eight other esteemed global anthropologists. The first title in the hugely popular 11-book Why We Post series has been downloaded an astonishing 227,336 times since it was published by UCL Press in early 2016.