Joseph Henry Press is an American publisher which is an imprint of the National Academies Press, publisher for the United States National Academy of Sciences. The imprint is named after American scientist Joseph Henry.
Press publishes books on science, technology, and health for the science-interested general public. JHP books represent a broad range of topics, from modern physics and frontiers of medicine to scientific biography and early childhood development.
Its parent press National Academies Press has been a leader in dissemination of electronic texts, with their front- and backlists of titles available online since 1996. According to a 1999 article in Publishers Weekly, NAP reported about $10 million a year in revenues, about half from book sales and half from providing publishing, printing and Web services to its institution and to academic and university presses.
NAP/JHP Executive Director Barbara Kline Pope has written a widely cited article on NAP's successes in electronic publishing. In it, she tells why the National Academies Press decided to give away its content, how it retained its intellectual property, what happened, and why she thinks others might do the same.
Notable publications have included Neil de Grasse Tyson's One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos (2000); John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003); J. Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003); Edmund Blair Bolles's Einstein Defiant: Genius versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution (2004); and Francisco J. Ayala's Darwin's Gift: to Science and Religion (2007).
Some Joseph Henry Press titles are available for free online reading; its parent press offers more than 4,000 reports online for free reading, and more than 2000 PDFs and ebooks for sale.