Mattering Press is a UK registered charity, whose charitable object is focused on advancing understandings of Science and Technology Studies via its open access books. As such, we report annually to the Charity Commission for England and Wales, in line with our financial year, which ends annually on April the 5th. We are strongly committed to being transparent about our activities as a press and a charity. We therefore provide as much detail as we can in our reports. Past reports, as well as our accounts, and further details about Mattering Press can be accessed directly on the Charity Commission website.
Below is our report for the April 2024 to APril 2025 financial year. These reports are also aimed at those seeking to understand more about the press’ work, including institutions that provide the press with annual financial support, via our Supporter Programme hosted by the Open Book Collective. As we explore in the report below, This funding is vital to the sustainability of the press.
Aims and Purposes
Mattering Press is an Open Access publisher that is dedicated to increasing access to the social scientific study of expert-led knowledge in a field often referred to as Science and Technology Studies (STS). As an open access publisher we aim to increase access to research in the field of STS by making it widely and freely available in the form of monographs and edited collections.
Mattering Press established itself as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) on the 15th May 2013. The object of the charity as set out in our constitution is “To advance the education of the public in Science and Technology Studies, in particular by commissioning and publishing social scientific work on an open access basis”. All Mattering books are, therefore, freely available as ebooks and as printed books to purchase. We also support books using formats that are experimental or difficult to publish using conventional publishing models.
Publication activity and engagement
This was a year of public recognition and engagement for the Press. Although we did not publish any books within this 12 month period (although have since, as we will mention below), we made important steps towards further anchoring the press’ reputation as a key venue for the publication of long form, peer reviewed scholarship, of the highest quality within and relating to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).
This came together most visibly at the EASST 4S 2024 conference, which took place at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam in July 2024. This biannual conference is the highest profile European venue for bringing together a global STS community. It also marked a symbolic return to physical scholarly co-presence, as the worst effects of the Covid-19 pandemic were receding from view, for many at least.
As we describe in a post-event reflection we authored, the standout moment from the Press’ perspective was witnessing Irina Papazu collect the 2024 Chris Freeman Award for Democratic Situations, which Irina edited jointly with Andreas Birkback. It felt like an incredibly important moment for the press, to see our work being institutionally legitimated in such a public way. Many congratulations once again to Irina, Andreas and all the book’s authors.
Mattering was present at the conference in many other ways. We had a stand, kindly offered to us by the conference organisers. This presented the opportunity for the press’ then seven editors (we have since expanded to eight) to engage with a range of colleagues, including readers, authors past and present. We were also pleased to me able to meet colleagues from Vrije Universiteit library itself, which is one of the institutions providing potentially renewable financial support to Mattering Press, by subscribing to our Supporter Programme the Open Book Collective. Thanks, as ever, to all our library supporters.
In addition to this, the Press’ editors took part in a range of other activities related to open access publishing. Joe Deville continued his role as Principal Investigator of the Copim Open Book Futures project, funded by Research England and Arcadia, which is developing a range of solutions, workflows and scholarly interventions for supporting longform open access publishing. He also continued his role as Managing Director of Open Book Collective, whose impact on the Press’ work is documented above. Julien McHardy also contributed to the Copim project, as part of the Experimental Publishing Group. This included his ongoing work as a key member of the Editorial Oversight Group of the Experimental Publishing Compendium, as well as contributing to the ongoing experimental open access publication, Deep Maps: Blue Humanities, as documented in two updates, on in October 2024, the other in March 2025, as well as a range of other Experimental Publishing Group collective outputs.
Forthcoming publications
The end of the 2024-2025 financial year was spent working on the then forthcoming publication of Technoscientific Globalisation from Below, edited by Mathieu Quet, Koichi Kameda, Jessica Pourraz and Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar. This book was published in September 2025 and we will say more about this in the next annual report, which covers this financial year.
We are also working on eight forthcoming texts. These include Homo Textor: Weaving as a (Technical Mode of Existence), which we announced as a forthcoming title recently. More details of the other texts will be announced in due course, but they include a co-authored monograph on cleaning practices in Amsterdam, a three-part multi-author volume exploring predictions as a social scientific and artist practice, an experimental text exploring site specific propositions relating to archives from a UK cathedral, and an edited collection exploring what the authors call ‘value economies’ of diverse kinds.
Finances and accounts
This financial year, as shown in our full accounts, and summarised below, the press generated £18,494 in revenue. This was primarily made up of direct income from institutions, covering production costs of books, and income from contributions from supporting libraries, via our OBC Supporter Programme. Our total revenue more or less precisely matched our costs, which totalled £18,186. 48% of these costs were associated with staffing, relating to the Press’ first employee, our Publishing Project Manager, a major development we discussed in our last annual report. As we noted there, this role has been transformational for the long term sustainability of the press, putting us on a far more stable financial and operational footing and helping us further move away from a dependence on volunteer labour. Book production costs were the second largest category, at 16%, followed by Marketing costs at 11%.
| 2023-2024 | 2024-2025 | |
| OBC Supporter Programme Income | £4,447 | £8,394 |
| Book Processing Fees | £854 | £9,217 |
| Book Sales | £5,511 | £883 |
| Donations | £104 | £0 |
| Total | £10,916 | £18,494 |
Metrics and impact
As a small press, we do not currently have the capacity to provide reliable quantitative measures of the impact of our books in terms of usage. This is something we are, however, continuing to work on with our partners in the Copim community.
We are able to provide some indicative citation statistics for our books (via Google Scholar, 3rd February 2026). For edited collections, this includes citations only for the book as a whole.
Mattering Press books were cited an additional 159 times in the past 12 months, achieving a total of 855 citations to date. This is broken down as follows (in brackets shows change vs. last year):
The Ethnographic Case (2nd Edition)
Edited by Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski
Publication year: 2023
Citations: 6 (+2)
Democratic Situations
Edited by Andreas Birkbak and Irina Papazu
Publication year: 2022
Citations: 24 (+4)
Concealing for Freedom
Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani (Foreword by Laura DeNardis)
Publication year: 2022
Citations: 34 (+12)
Engineering the Climate
Julia Schubert
Publication year: 2022
Citations: 20 (+10)
With Microbes
Edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthäus Rest and Salla Sariola
Publication year: 2021
Citations: 61 (+23)
Environmental Alterities
Edited by Cristóbal Bonelli and Antonia Walford
Publication year: 2022
Citations: 3 (+1)
Sensing In/Security
Edited by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker & Geoffrey C. Bowker
Publication year: 2021
Citations: 23 (+4)
Energy Worlds in Experiment
Edited by James Maguire, Laura Watts & Brit Ross Winthereik
Publication year: 2021
Citations: 17 (-)
Boxes: A Field Guide
Edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi
Publication year: 2020
Citations: 25 (+8)
An Anthropology of Common Ground
Nathalia Brichet
Publication year: 2018
Citations: 11 (-)
Ghost-Managed Medicine
Sergio Sismondo
Publication year: 2018
Citations: 188 (+40)
Inventing the Social
Edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim, Alex Wilkie
Publication year: 2018
Citations: 166 (+23)
Energy Babble
Andy Boucher, Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael, Liliana Ovalle, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, and Alex Wilkie
Publication year: 2018
Citations: 21 (+3)
Modes of Knowing
Edited by John Law, Evelyn Ruppert
Publication year: 2016
Citations: 109 (+9)
Imagining Classrooms
Vicki Macknight
Publication year: 2016
Citations: 11 (+2)
On Curiosity
Frank Cochoy
Publication year: 2016
Citations: 41 (+4)
Practising Comparison
Publication year: 2016
Citations: 95 (+14)
Governance
Mattering Press is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) whose only voting members are its charity trustees. The charity trustees are also the General Editors for the Press. The Editors, or the Board of Trustees meet quarterly to administer the business of the Press. All decisions are brought to the board either via email or during meetings. Trustees each have a portfolio that they are responsible for administering.
In the event of a retiring trustee, the board will meet to discuss the skill requirements needed to fill the position. In selecting individuals for appointment as charity trustees and Editors, the board has regard for the skills, knowledge and experience needed to administer the CIO.
Nominations for the new Trustee may come from the Board or the wider STS community. The Editors will vote to accept new applications at a General Meeting. New trustees are then inducted into charity business at their first Trustees meeting. During this meeting they are briefed about their legal obligations under charity law, the Charity Commission guidance on public benefit, the Mattering Press Constitution, the committee and decision-making processes, the business plan and recent financial performance of the charity. The work of administering the charity is supported by the press’ two Advisory Boards.
Reference and administrative details
Charity Number: 1152056
The Trustees that have served during the financial year here reported and until the date this report was approved are as follows:
- Uli Beisel, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
- Endre Dányi, Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany
- Joe Deville, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
- Anna Dowrick, Oxford University, UK
- Julien McHardy, Studio, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Michaela Spencer, Charles Darwin University, Australia
- Natalie Gill, University of West England, Bristol, UK
There have been no changes in Trustees over the period.
This report was approved on 4 February 2026 by Uli Beisel, Endre Dányi, Joe Deville, Anna Dowrick, Natalie Gill, Julien McHardy, and Michaela Spencer.