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
The Singing Detainee and the Librarian with One Book: Essays on Exile
(punctum books, 2025-05-16) Beltran, Michael
In late 2019, journalist Michael Beltran found himself in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, deep in conversation with Filipino revolutionary leaders Jose Maria Sison and Julie de Lima. What was planned to be a feature article ended up as a collection of observations on what it means to live in exile. Sison and de Lima are maligned by governments and revered by activists worldwide, all while spending most of their time tucked away in a small Dutch neighborhood. What Beltran realized was that it was impossible to speak of their exile without understanding the history and community surrounding it.
The Singing Detainee and the Librarian with One Book shares lesser known tales about two of the most well-known revolutionary exiles and their comrades. It speaks of a community and history behind the ordeal, weaving it into the Filipino diaspora. Sison passed away in December 2022, making this book a record of one of the last and arguably lengthiest interviews he ever gave. The essays track the couple’s prolonged stay as refugees, how the Philippine liberation movement found a home in Europe, and how migrants and activists alike gravitated toward each other while adrift from their homeland. “Exile,” Beltran says, “is imprisonment by displacement […] when people are condemned to leave their lands dressed in invisible chains.”
Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms, Part II: R/evolution Technologies
(punctum books, 2025-05-27) del Val, Jaym*/Jaime
Ontohackers redefines what movement, worlds, and bodies are through the sense of proprioception reconceptualized as formless fluctuation field, a movement matrix that is itself also thought, and which underlies all life forms and fields, including the inorganic. Our worlds are made of endless such entangled fields n-folding in neverending variation or enferance. The current planetary crisis has emerged due to an accidental evolutionary alignment, narrowing, and impoverishment of that matrix’s indeterminacy, that appeared gradually and eventually with bipedalism, and which created an imbalance between the larger proprioceptive field and its brain, and made the atrophied body extend itself technically in geometric fields gradually covering the planet, along with its fears, with disastrous consequences that are unleashing an unprecedented type of mass extinction and species suicide.
The reply to this crisis – which is urgently due if we are to reduce even slightly the collapse coming up over the next decades – is in recovering a lost sensorimotor plasticity which is also cognitive, affective, and relational plasticity, through developing movement technes for cultivating Body Intelligence (BI), reversing and taking elsewhere the failed evolution culminating in AI, stepping down from humanist supremacist pedestals, undoing our dependency upon unsustainable killing machines of sedentary consumerism that impoverish experience, stopping the reproduction of a species that has become plague (by reversing heteronormative reproductive dogmas till we reach preagricultural population levels), and recovering the joys of moving with the world, in symbiotic mutation, towards unprecedented evolutionary variations: this is our cosmic responsibility for all life on Earth.
The book’s structure expresses Enferance Theory with regard to how processes of becoming have a triple movement: an incipiency unfolding the field (Part I), a condensation-expansion where the field acquires full consistency (Part II), and a resonance or memory of the field relating to other fields (Part III).
Part II, subtitled R/evolution Technologies, includes Books 4, 5, and 6 and is by far the longest volume, elaborating in depth the book’s proposals in a triple movement. It first exposes the technologies of variation in nature (Book 4), followed by the technologies of reduction in the Algoricene (Book 5), and finally the possibilities for overcoming the reductive fold (Book 6). Book 4 proposes a swarming chaosmology as theory of orgiastic evolution, culminating in the concept of metabiosis: life as indeterminate, symbiotic mutation. Book 5 diagnoses the regimes that have formatted movement and presents the theory of the Algoricene, or Age of Extinctions and Algorithms. It exposes a kinetic ontology, genealogy, and dynamics of power. An interlude discusses post-, trans-, and metahumanism, and a second part of the book unfolds a radical critique of the Planetary Holocaust. Book 6 unfolds metaformance aesthetics and metahuman politics, including the theory of metaformativity, the ontohacking pragmatics, and a choral Dionysian ontology, where the author also discusses at length hir own techniques and art projects, involving a radical challenge to human supremacism to face the extinction challenge now threatening all life on Earth, toward an Earth liberation and regeneration.
Oral Poetry
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-05-28) Finnegan, Ruth
This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the vast field of 'oral poetry,' encompassing everything from American folksongs, contemporary pop songs, and Inuit lyrics, to the heroic epics of Homer, biblical psalms, and epic traditions in Asia and the Pacific. Taking a broad comparative approach, it explores oral poetry across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. Drawing on global research, Ruth Finnegan, the author of the seminal Oral Literature in Africa, sheds light on key debates such as the nature of oral tradition, the relationship between poetry and society, the differences between oral and written forms, and the role of poets in predominantly non-literate contexts.
Written from a primarily anthropological and literary perspective, this study contributes to the socio-cultural aspects of verbal art while also engaging with the literary dimensions of poetry which happens at any given moment to be unwritten. Finnegan's clear, non-technical language and extensive use of translated examples make this work accessible to a wide audience, appealing not only to sociologists and anthropologists but also to those with an interest in poetry, in comparative literature, and in global folk traditions.
The re-issue of this classic study is now augmented by further illustrations and a newly written Introduction and Conclusion, situating it in the context of the contemporary study of literature.
Bioethics: A Coursebook
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-05-12) Collective, COMPOST; Moormann, Emma; Hens, Kristien; Buyst, Nele; Devos, Ina; Kenis, Daan; Meinen, Lisanne; Mertens, Mayli; Ratajczyk, Yanni; Vulliermet, Franlu; Stadlbauer, Christina; Vandeput, Bartaku; Paleri, Varsha Aravind; Villafuerte, Ilya Gordon; Struyf, Joke
This coursebook offers an expansive exploration of bioethics, an interdisciplinary field examining ethical, social, and legal dilemmas in medicine, life sciences, and beyond. It challenges conventional boundaries, embracing Van Rensselaer Potter’s vision of bioethics as a global, holistic ethics of life—integrating human health, environmental considerations, and transdisciplinary insights.
Through engaging discussions, thought experiments, and case studies, the book empowers students to critically reflect on ethical questions without dictating rigid answers. Topics range from the historical roots of ethical thought to cutting-edge debates in molecular biology, such as epigenetics and exposomics, demonstrating how interconnected human, animal, and environmental health truly are.
Central themes include the limits of scientific knowledge, the biases shaping research, and the evolving interplay between moral philosophy and empirical science.
Students will encounter key philosophical frameworks—ontology, epistemology, and ethics—woven into practical bioethical applications. Feminist philosophy, experimental bioethics, and embedded ethics enrich this perspective, urging readers to question assumptions, embrace diverse viewpoints, and connect ethical principles with real-world science.
Targeted at students in philosophy, biology, biomedical sciences, and bioengineering, this book is a toolkit for future thinkers, fostering a nuanced understanding of how ethical science advances humanity in a complex, ever-changing world.
Qur’an Translations in the Eastern Bloc and Beyond
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-05-21) Pink, Johanna; Yakubovych, Mykhaylo; Kulieva, Elvira
This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of Qur’an translations across the diverse landscapes of the former Eastern Bloc, from Uzbekistan to the German Democratic Republic. With a focus on how Islamic texts have been shaped by state policies, ideological shifts, and religious identities, it traces connections between these regions and the wider world, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and China. This volume draws on perspectives from both Sunni and Shia traditions, as well as contributions by non-Muslim scholars. Through archival research and close textual analysis, the contributors demonstrate how translations of the Qur’an have served not only as religious texts but also as reflections of profound transformations in national and religious identities in communist and post-communist societies.
Qur’an translations have gained prominence within the modern Muslim publishing world, and their analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between local politics and global Islamic discourse. They have become symbols of religious resurgence, cultural renewal, and intellectual exchange—but also objects of persecution and contestation. Based on multilingual sources, this collection is an essential resource for understanding Qur’an translations as a significant scholarly and cultural phenomenon in the modern era.
Contact us at support@repository.cam.ac.uk
Follow us on twitter - @CamOpenAccess or @CamOpenData
Read the Unlocking Research blog