Transaction Publishers - Overview

Overview

Transaction Publishers is an academic publisher of the social sciences. It was founded by Irving Louis Horowitz, who served as Transaction's Chairman of the Board and Editorial Director until his death in 2012. In an evaluation of twenty-one international social-science book publishers according to nineteen quality criteria, Transaction Publishers ranked sixth.

Transaction began on July 1, 1962 as part of a multiplex grant sponsored by the Ford Foundation at Washington University in St. Louis. From beginnings as a social science magazine, Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society —later Society— Transaction Publishers evolved into a full fledged publisher of books, journals, and eBooks.

In 1969, Transaction relocated to the newly formed Livingston College, on the Livingston campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ. The Transaction mission with respect to the university has been, and continues to be, the enhancement of its social science and public policy capacities. Many editors, authors, and advisors are drawn from the faculty. Close to 200 faculty members have been authors and editors of Transaction books.

AldineTransaction is an imprint of Transaction Publishers. Formerly a division of Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Aldine Publishing Co. was acquired by Transaction in July 2004, and the books are now published under the imprint AldineTransaction. AldineTransaction publishes classic books in the fields of sociology, anthropology, economics, sociobiology, physical anthropology, and public policy. It acquired book lists from Precedent Publishers in 2009 and the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research (CUPR) in 2011.

Transaction has published more than 6,000 titles, with more than 90 percent still in print.

Transaction once published academic journals, including its flagship journal, Society; however, Transaction sold its journal publishing program to Springer Science+Business Media in 2007.

In 2010, Penn State University announced the "Irving Louis Horowitz–Transaction Publishers Archives, 1939-2009" open for public research at Penn State's Historical Collections and Labor Archives (HCLA) of The Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries. The archive documents the expansion of social science research over the past half century.