Publication Guide
Bloomsbury Academic is the scholarly division of Bloomsbury Publishing plc - the independent London publisher founded in 1986 and listed on the London Stock Exchange. Launched as a dedicated academic division in 2008, it has grown into one of the leading humanities and social-sciences (HSS) book publishers through a long run of acquisitions: A & C Black (2000), Methuen Drama (2006), Berg Publishers (2008), Continuum (2011, which brought T&T Clark), Hart Publishing (2013), I.B. Tauris (2018), Zed Books (2020), ABC-CLIO (2021), and the Rowman & Littlefield academic list (2024) - a purchase that roughly doubled the size of Bloomsbury's US Academic & Professional business.
Unlike most publishers covered on SciSpace, Bloomsbury Academic is book-primary: its core outputs are research monographs, handbooks, textbooks, and major digital reference platforms rather than APC-funded journals. This guide explains which Bloomsbury imprint fits your work, how open access operates for books, how proposal-based peer review works, and how to submit.
Which Bloomsbury Academic route fits your work?
| You're most likely to... | Choose this route |
|---|---|
| Publish an HSS research monograph or edited collection | Bloomsbury Academic - the core imprint for history, philosophy, literary studies, education, media, politics, and religious studies. |
| Publish legal scholarship - monographs or legal reference | Hart Publishing - Bloomsbury's Oxford-based law imprint, a leading UK publisher of legal monographs (OSCOLA style). |
| Publish in biblical studies or theology | T&T Clark - the historic theology imprint (est. 1821, joined via Continuum in 2011). |
| Publish drama, performance, or theatre studies | Methuen Drama - play texts, performance scholarship, and the Drama Online platform. |
| Publish in Middle East studies, international relations, or global development | I.B. Tauris or Zed Books - area studies and critical development scholarship. |
| Publish fashion, design, or visual-arts scholarship | Bloomsbury Visual Arts / Fairchild Books - with Bloomsbury Fashion Central (incl. the Berg Fashion Library) as the digital home. |
| Make your book open access without personal funds | Bloomsbury Open Collections - a library-funded collective model that opens selected frontlist titles with no author fee. |
What Bloomsbury Academic publishes
- Research monographs and edited collections across the humanities, social sciences, and law - the core of the list.
- Handbooks and companions - large reference volumes commissioned per field.
- Textbooks and student resources, including Fairchild Books in fashion and design.
- Digital research platforms - Bloomsbury Collections (the ebook research platform), Bloomsbury Fashion Central (incorporating the Berg Fashion Library), Drama Online, and reference products expanded by the ABC-CLIO acquisition.
- A small journals list - Bloomsbury is not a journals house; a handful of periodicals sit with imprints such as Hart Publishing, but there is no large APC-based journal program. (Berg's fashion journals moved to another publisher after 2013.)
Open access at Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury supports open access primarily for books, and its early 2008 relaunch under a Creative-Commons-friendly model made it one of the first commercial houses to experiment with OA monographs.
| Route | How it works | Cost to author |
|---|---|---|
| Bloomsbury Open Access (Gold, per title) | Individual books published OA under a Creative Commons licence (typically CC BY), usually paid by a funder or institution | Book processing charge varies - check the current Bloomsbury OA policy |
| Bloomsbury Open Collections | Library-funded collective model: participating libraries fund a subject collection and selected frontlist titles are opened for everyone | No author fee |
| Green self-archiving | Authors may deposit accepted chapter/monograph manuscripts in repositories per Bloomsbury's self-archiving policy | Free |
Waivers or discounts on OA book fees are considered case by case - raise funding early with your commissioning editor. Because Bloomsbury is book-primary, journal-style transformative agreements play little role here.
Peer review process
- Proposal-based review: you submit a proposal (plus sample chapters); the commissioning editor sends it to external specialist reviewers.
- Model: reviewer identities are typically not disclosed to authors; Hart Publishing uses double-anonymized review for its legal list.
- Full-manuscript review: many monographs are also reviewed in full before final acceptance, at the editor's discretion.
- Turnaround: expect roughly 2-4 months from proposal to a contract decision, depending on reviewer availability - slower than journal timelines, normal for book publishing.
How to submit
- Pick the imprint. Match your subject to the right imprint (Bloomsbury Academic, Hart, T&T Clark, Methuen Drama, I.B. Tauris, Zed).
- Find the commissioning editor. Bloomsbury lists editors by subject on its 'for authors' pages - proposals go to a named editor, not a portal queue.
- Prepare the proposal. A typical package: overview, chapter outline, market/competition statement, timetable, CV, and one or two sample chapters.
- Follow house style. Bloomsbury lists generally use Chicago or MHRA referencing (OSCOLA at Hart) - confirm in the imprint's author guidelines.
- Respond to review. Revise per reviewer feedback; contracts are issued after editorial-board approval.
Ethics and integrity
Bloomsbury is a member of COPE and follows COPE guidance on authorship, plagiarism, and corrections across its academic list. Standard scholarly-publishing expectations apply: original work, cleared third-party permissions (especially for images in visual-arts titles), and declared conflicts of interest. Questions about ethics or licensing are handled by the relevant commissioning editor.
