Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans.

The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.

Publisher Frances Pinter is talking to "very high-level academics" across the disciplines to build up the list, which she hopes to reach 200-odd titles a year by 2014, but Sulston and his colleague John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, are the first editors of a series she's signed up. The books she hopes to publish are intended to appeal to the "educated layman" as well as to academic circles and should "help the academic world speak to people who should be listening to what they have to say," she said today.

Sulston and Harris's series, Science, Ethics and Innovation, will be aimed "at a very wide market", covering subjects from "the interplay between science and society, to new technological and scientific discoveries and how they impact on our understanding of ourselves and our place in society", and the responsibility of science to the wider world. Authors they will be looking to commission will range from academics to policymakers, opinion formers, those working in commercial scientific roles, "and maybe even politicians". "They'll be non-technical books which will appeal to any intelligent person," said Harris. "The proverbial Guardian reader."

Sulston and Harris's own current research into topics including genetic ethics and human enhancement is also likely to "find its way" into the series, said Sulston. "Bloomsbury's is a new business model and chimes absolutely with something I've been involved with for years – open access to scientific data," he said. "We immediately hit common ground with Frances Pinter and felt if Bloomsbury was keen to go ahead, we were keen to be part of it."

He stressed that the area he and Harris would be covering - the interface between science, ethics and innovation - was of international interest, and offering the books for free online would allow readers around the world to access them. "Most of the world is very poor and access to literature is a real issue. There are all sorts of ways of sorting this out, and this is clearly one of them," he said.

Cyber enhancement, he said, was a likely topic. "The use of machines and technology to enhance human functions is a very important new area."

The first and only book Bloomsbury Academic has published so far, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy, has been downloaded for free in 105 countries, said Pinter, but has also been selling well. "Not everyone has enough money to buy a physical book so we're delighted we can get Lawrence's message to people who can't afford the book," she said. "And we're delighted we can sell books too."

Pinter estimates that Bloomsbury would have to sell around 200 copies of a highly technical monograph, priced at around £50, to make a profit, but a more commercial title with a wider appeal and a lower price point would need to sell around 2,000 copies to be worthwhile. "We believe there are enough people who are willing to purchase a hard copy that we will sell enough physical books to meet our needs, to cover our costs and make a modest profit," she said. "But we won't be able to judge whether [the model is] financially viable for the next two years." And with academics more and more frequently looking to publish their work themselves online, Pinter is adamant that "if

publishers are not willing to experiment with models, academics will bypass publishers".

Sulston, who jointly won a 2002 Nobel prize for discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death, is the perfect launch editor for the series, she believes. "I've followed what John has been doing and I just think the world of him," she said. "He's very forward looking in terms of what we can do with science – cyber enhancement, genetic manipulation – and all of these things need very sophisticated public debate."