How HSS Scholarly Publishing Supports Social Justice: Imprint Evolution and Community Engagement

Sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan

Recorded on 08/22/2022
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 274

The publication of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) motivated publishers to assess their own mission statements and level of engagement within the scholarly community. Centering goals in gender equality, clean energy, and quality education can strengthen research, heighten impact, and encourage a global perspective. How else can community engagement goals facilitate a publisher’s imprint evolution?

In the third episode of this series, Felicity Plester and Tamsine O’Riordan, both at Palgrave Macmillan, discuss the publisher’s recent developments and adoption of sustainability targets. First, they walk through the balance between pursuing emerging areas of research and maintaining traditional coverage of HSS disciplines. They also discuss peer review, touching on reviewer recruitment and Palgrave Macmillan’s evolving approach to OA. Last, the guests underscore the publisher’s role in community engagement, highlighting the influence of the SDGs and programs like Social Science Matters and Campaign for the Humanities.

About the guests:

Felicity Plester headshot

Felicity Plester
Editorial Director for Humanities
Palgrave Macmillan

Felicity is Editorial Director for Humanities at Palgrave Macmillan with overall responsibility for the literature; film, culture and media studies; and theatre and performance studies scholarly books programmes.  She leads a team of seven Editors based in our London and New York offices, who publish high quality, cutting-edge research in a range of formats, including monographs, edited collections, scholarly Handbooks, major reference works, textbooks and Palgrave Pivots across these diverse subjects.  Prior to becoming Editorial Director, she headed up the film, culture and media studies team at Palgrave, but also has experience of commissioning into the literature and theatre lists.  Felicity joined Palgrave in 2010, having previously been Commissioning Editor for environment, development and public and social policy at Edward Elgar Publishing for five years.

Tamsine O’Riordan headshot

Tamsine O’Riordan
Editorial Director for Social Science
Palgrave Macmillan

Tamsine O’Riordan is Editorial Director for Social Science at Palgrave Macmillan, part of Springer Nature. In this role she leads a global team of 15 editors to respond and deliver cutting-edge and (inter)discipline-defining social science ideas and thought across a range of book types, as well as leading the Social Science Matters campaign. She has been with Palgrave since 2012 and before that built successful programmes for a variety of social science scholarly, trade and professional publishers over 20 years, working in the past for Practical Action, Earthscan and Zed Books.

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