Donating to LU Press
Are you a book-lover with money to spare and a desire to do something for the top-class, professionally designed and globally marketed scholarly book? A book which can at the same time be read for free by anyone with Internet access, including impecunious students in countries where book purchases are a luxury which few people can afford? Then Lund University Press is something for you.
Lund University Press started operating in 2015 on the basis of a sum granted by the former Vice-Chancellor Per Eriksson, but from the end of 2019 onwards LU Press is solely funded by the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology within the framework of their annual budget. For some of our book projects we may hope for publishing grants from various foundations, but in all essential respects the HT Faculties foot every bill from 2020.
Consequently, LU Press will, in practice, be competing with other urgently necessary research investments, including sabbaticals for lecturers, postdocs for young scholars and doctoral positions. The annual budget of approx. 1.5 million SEK (approx. £120,000 or $190,000) would, for instance, have covered two postdoctoral positions for twelve months each, or six months of full-time research each for three senior lecturers.
Donations to LU Press would hence improve the situation of the HT Faculties as well as enable the Press to publish more books and support its endeavour to promote the legitimacy of the scholarly book as the bearer of multi-faceted and profound knowledge.
Even today, the HT Faculties are grateful recipients of donations from munificent supporters whose importance to us cannot be overestimated. In addition to the exceedingly welcome additional funds, the generosity of our donors gives our researchers a feeling that their efforts are demanded and appreciated outside the academy. That feeling boosts their self-confidence, forming an invaluable stimulus in their work on developing what might be called ‘the life-sciences of the mind’ for the good of society as a whole.
Donations to Lund University Press may vary a great deal in size, but all are warmly welcome. To mention a couple of examples: A gift of SEK 25,000 makes it possible to incorporate pictorial material which would otherwise have been too costly to print. SEK 40,000 pays for linguistic editing which raises a competently written but less than idiomatic text in English to the level of an elegant and hard-hitting work. SEK 150,000 is enough for a professional translation from Swedish (or Danish, Norwegian, German, French, Spanish or Italian, the languages which LU Press is able to handle) into English of a book of about 250 pages. Added together, small contributions can support our activities in ways that make a great difference. At the other end of the imaginable scope of donations, the gift of 15 million SEK (approx. £1.2 million or $1.9 million) would either cover the total costs of the Press for 10-12 years or, in the form of a new foundation, yield an annual income which would pay for the publishing of two to three books a year in perpetuity.
Naturally, the names of donors will be mentioned in the publications they have helped to finance. When the Press has more than one book in the pipeline, donors may select the one(s) with which they would prefer to be associated.
If professional book-publishing of the highest scholarly quality is something you would like to support, please contact us. I – Marianne Thormählen, Publishing Director (marianne.thormahlenenglund.luse) – will be only too happy to hear from you. Or you may prefer to contact Helena Perhag, fundraiser at the Development Office (helena.perhagfsi.luse).
Welcome to an initial talk about how you can help to make sure that top-class Lund research about the terms of human existence gets out and about all over the world!
Marianne Thormählen
Publishing Director, Lund University Press