Open Library of Humanities celebrates five year anniversary
The charitable organisation that is dedicated to publishing world-leading open access humanities scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges turned five this week.
Launched in 2015, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an online publishing platform that is dedicated to publishing world-leading open access to humanities scholarship with no author-facing processing charges. The OLH was created to widen access to academic publishing and was originally funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Today it is funded by payments from the international library consortium that include Harvard Library, Cambridge and Yale.
The innovative, not-for-profit and sustainable business model has proved highly popular; from launching with just seven journals and 99 institutions and has now grown to attract nearly 300 supporting institutions, and hosts 28 peer-reviewed journals.
What’s more, over the course of the five years the OLH has garnered international recognition. This year they were Highly Commended in The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Awards for Innovation in Publishing and in 2019 they won the Coko Foundation Open Publishing Award in the category of Open Publishing models.
In recognition of this milestone, the team have written a paper for Liber Quarterly detailing the lessons they have learnt since launching the project.
Martin Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing and founder of the OLH said:
"Building OLH over the past five years has been a pleasure and a privilege. We have worked with countless individuals, worldwide, whether they be authors, editors, librarians, or partners, to unite in the shared goal of achieving equitable open access to humanities publications. We have shown that alternative business models can work and that these work better than article processing charges. I look forward to the next five years and what it may bring."