Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press), a publishing house of Qatar Foundation, is planning to introduce projects in an initiative to promote local talent, says a senior official.
In this regard, HBKU Press will publish more books that reflects research being conducted in the country and also will provide a pre-submission editorial service to review manuscripts of local authors. “This focus on the local community aims to further assist the scholarly output from Qatar,” said Dr Alwaleed Alkhaja, Senior Editor at HBKU Press.
“HBKU Press plans to launch a pre-submission editorial service to assist local authors in improving the quality of their manuscripts before submitting them to the journals of their choice. HBKU Press also plans to publish more academic books that showcase the cutting-edge research that is taking place in Qatar, as well as publish more books that reflect the research topics that Qatar is focusing on: from sustainability, to advance in therapy of genetic disease, to the social sciences,” he added.
In pre-submission editorial service, the team is consists of editors whose minimum qualification is PhD and many of them have postdoctoral research experiences with some of them have experience in working as reviewer of international journals. This highly qualified team will judge the manuscript based only on scientific merit and offer suggestions to improve the quality of work. HBKU Press formerly known as Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, launched its publishing programme in 2010 as a publishing house founded on international best practices, excellence and innovation.
HBKU Press publishes academic books, peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings along with trade titles in Arabic and English for children, adults, and young adults. This includes a wide range of fiction, non-fiction, educational and reference material, and children’s literature. A significant portion of its projects involve translating well-known works of Arabic into English and vice versa.
In 2010, HBKU Press established QScience.com, an open access platform that gives the public access to thousands of published research articles. HBKU Press is also planning to enhance its Arabic journal portfolio, either by publishing more Arabic articles in existing journals or by setting up new ones. “There are plans to introduce new Arabic journal titles in the future, using the open access models so that academics and the public do not have any barriers to access information, to meet these growing demands,” said Dr Alkhaja. At present Arabic language journals only contribute to a small fraction of international open access journals.
