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Frequently Asked Questions

Here are answers to the questions we receive regularly. If what you are looking for is not answered here, feel free to get in touch with us.

What is Kısmet?

Kısmet is the Turkish word for fate. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has been in use in Engish language since the 1840s. It is also the name of our publishing company! Founded in early 2014 by a small group of academics from the University of Leeds in response to the changing state of academic publishing, Kısmet Press publishes cutting-edge research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. All our publications are open access.

What is open access?

Broadly defined, open access in publishing means providing free and unrestricted access to scholarly research. It is becoming increasingly common as governments, universities and funding agencies put pressure on academics to make research, especially publicly funded research accessible to the general public. One major concern for open access publishing is how to facilitate this increased accessibility with the existing costs. There are currently different models of open access publishing, with many publishers moving towards a system in which the author or their institution pays the cost of publication upfront. Kismet Press does not charge such fees.

Where can I purchase your books?

All publications by Kısmet Press are and always will be free to read online on our website. They also are all archived on Internet Archive.

All our publications in print and electronic forms are distributed via Ingram. If you are purchasing for a library, a bookseller or another retailer, in most cases, we advise to order our books through Ingram, although we are happy to work directly with independent retailers. Please get in touch.

If you are an individual, you can purchase our publications from most online bookstores and retailers. You can also order our print publications from your local independent bookshop. Since we use a print-on-demand system, occasionally our printed publications may be listed as “temporarily unavailable” or “out of stock”, but this is almost always misleading. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you experience problems in purchasing our publications.