LPP – Open Access

LPP has recently begun commissioning academic Open Access (OA) books, the first of which will be published in 2025.

OA is rapidly becoming established as a viable and attractive model in scholarly book publishing, offering wide dissemination and discoverability of research. Readers and libraries can download your book electronically for free as well as being able to buy print and e-book editions. LPP will work with you to ensure that your book is published to the highest standards and collaboratively promoted to the academic community, while meeting funder requirements for Gold Open Access.

OA books published by LPP are subject to a stringent peer review process, with the same high-quality UK editing, typesetting and production as for all LPP books. Once we have a book in production we will typically produce it in six months.

We will always produce both a paperback print edition of your book and an e-book, with both being available for sale through booksellers internationally. Cover prices will be dependent on the size of the book, but will (in 2025) very rarely be higher than £40. Authors receive twenty-five complimentary copies of their printed book and a royalty on sales revenues from print and e-book sales. The OA, print and e-book editions will be published simultaneously.

LPP OA books are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This allows your work to be widely read and shared. There are several variants of Creative Commons licence – your editor will provide information on the available options.

Your DRM-free OA book will be listed on our website and included in DOAB and Google Books. You may share your OA book on your own website and through additional repositories of your choosing.

LPP will supply either printed books or PDFs to valid review media upon request, and we work with our authors to jointly stimulate reviews and general media attention for our books. We see publicity (via traditional review media, and increasingly via social media) as the key to attracting attention for our books.

OA books are subject to a Book Processing Charge on a sliding scale, starting at £8,000 (plus VAT) for a short book of up to 70,000 words and increasing to £10,000 (plus VAT) for a book of up to 120,000 words. These charges are payable when a script has been peer reviewed and accepted as ready for publication.

Our OA process is compliant with the new UKRI requirements for Open Access monograph publication, with the same exclusions.

Details of our first two titles, which are due to be published in 2025, follow below.

Petty Tyranny and Oppression? Lives under the 19th Century Poor Laws by Paul Carter and Steven King (Spring 2025)

This book looks at the issue of how and how effectively the state (both central and local) used its various powers to try and control the lives of its very poorest English and Welsh citizens. In particular, the authors focus on the workhouse as a mechanism for containing, directing, confining and disciplining the poor, and they do so in the context of both the Old and New Poor Laws. Turning away from the normative lens through which the operation of workhouses has increasingly been viewed – that of large-scale ‘national’ scandals – they develop a complementary model of ‘petty tyranny’ that has a greater geographical and temporal application across nineteenth-century England and Wales. They argue that managing and controlling the institutional poor, sending signals to inmates and those who might become inmates, was less a matter of extreme punishment, brazen neglect or brutal and deadly regimes, but that the parties who participated in the core power relationships of the Old and New Poor Laws generally dealt in lesser material, practical and symbolic currencies. These were small everyday acts, omissions, punishments, and neglects that became cumulative and well understood, creating a framework of oppression and the ground for resistance.

Dr Paul Carter is principal records specialist (Modern Domestic), Collaborative Projects at The National Archives. Professor Steven King is professor of economic and social history at Nottingham Trent University

Salvage: Living with the Disabled Welfare Citizen by Steven King (Autumn 2025)

This book aims to locate current debate about disability welfare fraud (in practice and in the public and political imagination) as merely one instance of a repetitive pattern stretching back to the beginnings of the British welfare state in 1601. The author develops a new model – ‘Salvage’ – that can simultaneously explain why current and historical actors in these debates take the positions they do and generate new proposals for the future of disability citizenship.

Steven King is Professor of Economic and Social History at Nottingham Trent University.