Goldsmiths in New Cross, London

Goldsmiths College is launching a new and ‘inventive’ academic publisher named The Goldsmiths Press.

Goldsmiths, which is located in South London, is part of University of London and is already well-known for its creative output. Many of the YBAs including Sarah Lucas, Sam Taylor-Wood and Damien Hirst studied at Goldsmiths, while current teaching staff include the novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones, the novelist Naomi Wood, the non-fiction writer Francis Spufford and the poet Jack Underwood. The Goldsmiths Prize, which celebrates ‘fiction at its most novel’ was launched at the university in 2013. Our own author Lars Iyer was shortlisted for the prize in the same year for his novel Exodus.

According to its website, the Press:

…will build on the principles of digital-first publishing and is driven by a widely documented need for new forms of academic publishing in the digital age. Digital first does not mean digital only, and we will publish print books as well as eBooks, apps and online resources.

The Press is also dedicated to publishing work that “exceeds the opposition between convention and experimentation” and is inviting submissions of ‘Audio, visual and/or performance work’, ‘Creative and life writing’, non-standard forms of communication such as ‘an article in the form of a comic or graphic novel’, and perhaps most intriguing of all:

Thought-in-action, provisional or process-capturing work such as briefs, scripts, blogs, storyboards, notebooks, opinion pieces, essays, clips, previews and samples

The submission guidelines have clearly been designed to challenge what academic work or research should look, read and sound like. Goldsmiths is also concerned about access to its publications and states it will:

…combine green open access with a fair and varied pricing model in order to avoid the exploitation of authors as well as readers, creators as well as users. The press is oriented toward academics, practice based researchers, practitioners and postgraduate students…While serving the academic community, The Goldsmiths Press will explore the many ways in which we can increase our reach to a wider public.

The first publication will be The Academic Diary by Les Back, a series of short essays, each of which “reflects the seasons of faculty existence located within what Elaine Showalter calls ‘academic time’.