Berghahn Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Berghahn Books began in 1994 when Marion Berghahn founded a press dedicated to the corners of scholarship that larger publishers often overlooked. Headquartered in both New York and Oxford, it set its sights on the humanities and social sciences, with particular attention to social and cultural anthropology, European history, politics, and film and media studies. What does it take to build a serious academic press from scratch? How does an independent publisher earn the trust of scholars and libraries around the world? And what does it mean, in the age of paywalls and rising journal costs, to try to give knowledge away for free? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Books Program

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  Around 140 new titles come out under the Berghahn imprint every year, joined by roughly 80 new paperback editions of earlier works. The backlist has grown to nearly 2,500 titles in print, a figure that reflects decades of steady, focused acquisition rather than broad-market chasing. New titles appear in both print and digital form simultaneously. A separate effort, the Berghahn Books Online platform, is working through the backlist to digitize older volumes. Many of the press's titles have received reviews in Choice, a journal widely used by academic librarians when deciding which books to purchase for their collections.

• 3. Journals and Recognition

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  Berghahn Journals publishes more than 40 journals across the social science and humanities fields that complement the books program. An annual series called Advances in Research joined the lineup in 2013. The journals have been available online since 2001, giving researchers electronic access for well over two decades. The awards column is notable. The AAP PROSE Award for Best New Journal in the Social Sciences and Humanities went to Berghahn twice in consecutive years: to Projections in 2008 and to Girlhood Studies in 2009. Girlhood Studies earned further recognition with a Highly Commended Certificate for the 2010 ALPSP Best New Journal Award.

• 4. Opening Access

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  Subscribe to Open, known as S2O, is a model that converts subscription journals into open-access publications when enough libraries commit to paying their usual fees. Berghahn joined Annual Reviews in adopting this approach. In 2019, Berghahn put forward 13 anthropology titles as S2O candidates; all 13 became freely available in 2020. The story continued on the 3rd of June 2021, when Berghahn Journals announced a significant new partnership. Social Anthropology, also known as Anthropologie Sociale, is the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, or EASA. EASA members had been publishing with Wiley, but they voted, in the press's own description, "overwhelmingly" to leave. Starting with Volume 30 in 2022, Social Anthropology moved into Berghahn's open-access anthropology set, with EASA describing the goal as making their journal "open access in a way that is sustainable and equitable."