Thoth Archiving Network Pilot at Cambridge
Cambridge University Library (CUL) is piloting participation in the Thoth Archiving Network, which will allow small presses to use a simple deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations, creating the opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their open books catalogue, should they cease to operate.
This is a pilot repository site hosting open access books by a range of publishers depositing content in Thoth. This site is maintained and managed by the Open Research Systems Team at Cambridge University Library (CUL).
More information about this pilot and the Open Book Futures Project is available at this page.
Open Book Futures
Recent Submissions
More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition: 2025 European Public Investment Outlook
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-12-08) Cerniglia, Floriana; Saraceno, Francesco
This outlook offers a timely and insightful exploration of Europe’s energy transition, a process that lies at the heart of today’s environmental, economic, and political debates. It examines the diverse commitments undertaken by European countries as they navigate the challenges of decarbonization and the shift to sustainable energy systems. By analyzing both the policy frameworks and the concrete instruments adopted to reach ambitious climate and energy goals, the book sheds light on the strategies shaping the continent’s future.
A particular emphasis is placed on the role of public investment, highlighting how state action can catalyze innovation, support infrastructure, and bridge gaps where market forces alone may fall short. Through this lens, the volume not only evaluates existing practices but also considers the broader implications for governance, equity, and long-term resilience.
Written with clarity and rigor, the outlook will be of interest to policymakers, scholars, and practitioners seeking to understand the dynamics of Europe’s green transition. It invites readers to consider the balance between national priorities and collective European objectives, offering valuable insights into how commitments translate into action—and how public investment can be a decisive lever for change.
Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty’s Constructive Project
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-12-02) Huckerby, Elin D.; Janack, Marianne
Richard Rorty (1931–2007), once dubbed ‘the man who killed truth’, is best known for challenging the idea that philosophy provides foundational knowledge. Yet beyond the controversy lies a vital, underexplored side of Rorty’s work: his constructive vision for fostering democratic solidarity in a world shaped by contingency and uncertainty. This volume shifts focus from defending Rorty to applying his insights for today’s fractured, post-truth culture.
Centered on Rorty’s "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989), the collection explores how his pragmatism helps us reimagine philosophy as a cultural practice—one grounded not in timeless truths, but in shared hopes, vocabularies, and democratic cooperation. The volume brings together seven original essays that revisit Rortyan concepts like liberal ironism, poetic redescription, eirenism, and democratic solidarity, and explore their implications for social justice, feminist theory, public discourse, and the humanities.
Rather than lament relativism or retreat into essentialism, these contributions demonstrate how Rorty’s philosophy offers practical, imaginative tools for navigating difference and building inclusive societies. Emphasizing creativity over certainty and solidarity over skepticism, this timely volume reclaims Rorty’s legacy as a philosopher of hope—and a resource for democratic renewal in our era of radical uncertainty.
Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-12-11) Lisboa, Maria Manuel
'Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma' traces the lives and works of six major artists and writers from Portugal, Brazil, and Britain through the lens of 'being broken'—in body, mind, or both. Spanning from the eighteenth century to the present, the volume explores how sociopolitical and somatic factors such as mental illness, psychological abuse, arthritis, genital mutilation, and multiple sclerosis shaped their creativity, while also reflecting broader national, social, sexual, and political pressures.
Engaging both literature and visual art, the book offers an original and provocative perspective that unsettles conventional narratives of health, gender, and identity in Lusophone and transnational contexts.
By situating canonical figures alongside emerging voices, 'Broken' bridges generations and disciplines, revealing how art and fiction transform experiences of illness and disability into critical insights on society, history, and power.
"FOLLOW THE PERSON": Archival Encounters
(punctum books, 2025-12-22) Alcalay, Ammiel
Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, and critical essayist extraordinaire, Ammiel Alcalay’s intrepid work has always moved across geographic, chronological, political, and linguistic borders. “FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters gathers a dizzying array of texts by Alcalay written over the past fifteen years, all of them having something to do with archival materials. In Alcalay’s case, however, these archives range from more traditional, institutionally-held materials and personal collections to the use of his own experiences and memories as sources for redrawing cultural maps that have too long been divided along sectarian lines of one kind or another.
Moving from the Beats and the Black Arts Movement to the Middle East, “FOLLOW THE PERSON” recalibrates our sense of living history while offering new possibilities for encounters that have been relegated to oblivion or never even imagined. Culled from a variety of eclectic sources and contexts, encountering these essays together offers a completely different experience of Alcalay’s essays, one that argues for a methodology based on minutely recorded events and historical contexts, and for necessary human and cultural encounters that provide models for a new, reinvigorated critical vocabulary.
As Miriam Nichols writes in her Introduction, “Follow the tenuous threads in this collection of writings and you may end up at the looted National Museum in Baghdad during the American invasion, or in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where most Iraqi state archives wound up. You may find yourself at Bashcharshiya, the market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, or in Palestine, on May 14, 1948. Maybe, if you are keen, you will pick up the thread that leads to 17th-century colonial Massachusetts, or perhaps you will stay in New York, rummaging through garbage cans with Diane di Prima, looking for journals and letters tossed out by a lover.” Whichever path you take, you will find multiple worlds, all rendered by Alcalay with light and compassion.
Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-17) Herrera, Linda
Education 2.0 offers a compelling portrait of Egypt’s bold attempt to overhaul its public education system amid sweeping political and technological transformation. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews, this book traces the launch and rollout of the ‘New Education System’ initiated by the Ministry of Education in 2018, designed to modernize curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in the digital age and change the ‘culture of learning’. The volume moves fluidly from macro-level state planning to the lived experiences of teachers and students, exploring the promises and pitfalls of top-down reform.
Conducted partly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the research captures Egypt’s first large-scale experiment with hybrid and distance learning. Interviews with key actors—from policymakers and tech developers to students and educators—reveal competing visions, unintended consequences, and the challenges of culturally transforming education systems in a middle-income country where private tutoring is rife, the sector is chronically under resourced, and politics overshadows policy.
This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in education reform, digital transformation, and the role of the state in shaping learning futures in the Global South. It is also an excellent case study for courses in Middle East studies and comparative and international education.
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