Blogpost by Barbara Budrich
We all know what it is like to be “in the flow”. Time is flying, and you have no idea of its speed. So, in 2024 I find myself the publisher of an academic publishing company that has been in the market for 20 years. Just like that.
Before I founded Verlag Barbara Budrich, I worked as commissioning editor with my father’s Verlag Leske + Budrich. (I can still see the building where my father worked in the early days from our current offices.) As a young editor, I saw the need for “our” academic disciplines to lean towards a more global perspective.
Therefore, I had a good look around, talked to our academic authors, and let everyone know that Leske + Budrich was looking for international publications.
It was Dirk Berg-Schlosser, who suggested I talk to a couple of political scientists from Canada. Apparently, they were looking for a publishing company willing to take on a book series set in the context of the International Political Science Association, IPSA.
IPSA book series
That was exactly what I had wished for. So, I got talking to John Trent and Michael Stein. And it didn’t take us long to negotiate an agreement for a “State of the Art” book series edited by IPSA’s Research Committee 33 “The Study of Political Science as a Discipline”. As a publisher, we agreed to present the books at every IPSA World Congress to come, i.e. every three years we had to turn up anywhere in the world to meet up with thousands of delegates from around the world. Thus, I had to go to Durban, South Africa, in 2003. And to Fukuoka, Japan, in 2006.
Between 2003 and 2006 something major happened, though. My father sold his company, and all pertinent agreements with it, of course. Including the arrangement with IPSA. At first, I went along and started working with the new publishing company, but it didn’t take me long to find out I was no good fit for a large corporation with its strict division of labour, of knowledge, of departments, with its hierarchies, and memos. That’s why, in May 2004, I founded my own publishing company, Verlag Barbara Budrich.
I had to leave a lot of authors behind. Plans and concepts we had pondered, discussed, and developed. Books – some of which have seen multiple new editions with the corporate publisher –, journals, and book series. It is tough to leave these behind. And to this day, I remember Manuel Castells telling me, “If you’re going, I am leaving, too.” However, pacta sunt servanda, and you can’t just leave a valid agreement. So, Manuel’s trilogy on the “Information Age” stayed in its German translation with the corporation. Not the IPSA book series, though.
The World of Political Science – The development of the discipline joined me in my new little home office before my company moved to its new headquarters. So, when I packed my bags for the IPSA World Congress in Japan in 2006, it was my own publishing company I had to represent.
It was in those early days, too, that we opened our first international office in North America. It was located in the US for some years, and later moved to Toronto, where we are still present. As we are in London, too.
European cooperations
Around that time, the European Political Science Network (eps-Net) was founded, by political scientists I was in close contact with. The EU was busy expanding further to the east, and I had plenty of occasion to visit conferences in Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, and other central European countries. Eps-Net later became part of ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) , and there were further European and international associations, organisations, and institutions that played an important role for the development of our list of publications. During the early years there was no one but me in the “international department” of my company, so, naturally, it was me packing my suitcases time and again. And I loved it.
With a tight-knit community of involved scholars, we thought up books, and even journals like PCS (which also originated in IPSA RCs). Today, our editorial team takes care of our various disciplines on a national and international level, and there are more than just one person, i.e., me, packing our suitcases and looking after international booths, presentations, conferences. It is my privilege still, though, to travel to the IPSA World Congresses most of the time (i.e., if there is no pandemic).
International network
It was mandatory to us to make our publications available to our readers in the entire world. And while that doesn’t sound too difficult today with the huge online bookseller, and ebooks to boot, it was a struggle in the beginning. These days, we have a global network of partners, who help us distribute the information on our list of books and journals worldwide. And with open access spreading like wildfire, our publications become affordable to anyone with access to the internet.
About Barbara Budrich
Barbara began working as an editor at the publishing house Leske + Budrich, which belonged to her father Edmund Budrich, in 1993. In 2004, after the sale of Leske + Budrich, Barbara founded her first own company, the publishing house Verlag Barbara Budrich. In 2007, she founded Budrich UniPress Ltd, which became Budrich Academic Press in 2019. Barbara also works as a coach, author, and translator and has published numerous books and essays.
Header image: unsplash.com / Priscilla Du Preez
Image Barbara Budrich: Nina Schöner Fotografie
