News – Results of OLH library board

“As part of our 2023-2030 plan for sustainable growth of the OLH, we are pleased to be re-constituting our Library Board as one of three elected Advisory Boards.  We were delighted to have received such strong candidates and are very grateful to all of those who participated in the election process this summer. We are very happy to announce our 15 newly elected Library Board members who will serve for a term of three years. Below is the full list of Library Board members.

Agnès Ponsati, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) (Spain)
Curtis Brundy, Iowa State University (United States)
Demmy Verbeke, KU Leuven Libraries (Belgium)
Andreas Ferus, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria)
Ingrid Mason, AI for Libraries, Archives, and Museums Australasian chapter (Australia)
James Kessenides, Yale University (United States)
Katarina Wiberg, National Library of Sweden (Sweden)
Maureen Walsh, Ohio State University (United States)
Pekka Olsbo, University of Jyväskylä (Finland)
Robert Atkinson, Birkbeck, University of London (United Kingdom)
Sharla Lair, Lyrasis (United States)
Shiela Winchester, University of Texas Libraries (United States)
Susanne van Rijn, Leiden University Libraries?(The Netherlands)
Theo Andrew, University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
Oya Y. Rieger, Ithaka S+R (United States)…”

Public access to published science is under threat in the US | InPublishing

Eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill’s draft language.

Frontiers says The US House Appropriations Committee has released its 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. It proposes new spending of $58 billion and seeks to “rein in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs.”

A group of eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the bill’s draft language. If enacted, it would block federally funded research from being freely available to American taxpayers without delay on publication.

Individual Americans would be prevented from seeing the full benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research they fund each year via taxes. Science for the few who can access it – as opposed to the many who pay for it – is inefficient as scientific or democratic governmental policy.

 

 

The Lower Decks. A Symposium on Janeway and Open Access Publishing.

“Since its launch, the Janeway and Open Library of Humanities (OLH) team has built an international, award-winning, and critically acclaimed platform and is widely recognised to be one of the foremost academic-led publishers of open access scholarship in the humanities. As we look forward to the next five years, we aspire to consolidate our position as a leading open source scholarly publishing platform, innovate our software in line with user needs, and bring together our community to both increase visibility and make Janeway the very best platform of its kind.”

Programme now live: The Lower Decks: A symposium on Janeway and Open Access Publishing. Sept 07-08, 2023 @ Birkbeck, University of London and online. #JanewayOA23 | Open Library of Humanities

Location: Birkbeck, University of London, & streaming online

Dates: 07/09/2023 – 08/09/2023

Cost: Free

Registration: https://thelowerdecks.janeway.systems/signup (closes on 22 August)

Conference programme: https://thelowerdecks.janeway.systems/programme

In celebration of the ten-year anniversary since the launch of the project of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open access journal publisher, and the five-year anniversary of Janeway, its ground-breaking open-source scholarly publishing platform, we are holding a symposium to explore future directions for Janeway engineering and open access publishing.

Since its launch, the Janeway and OLH team has built an international, award-winning, and critically acclaimed platform and is widely recognised to be one of the foremost academic-led publishers of open access scholarship in the humanities. As we look forward to the next five years, we aspire to consolidate our position as a leading open source scholarly publishing platform, innovate our software in line with user needs, and bring together our community to both increase visibility and make Janeway the very best platform of its kind. Accordingly, Janeway and OLH staff are hosting a symposium which will include presentations on best practice, future developments and breakout sessions to hear from our community as we work together to make these a reality. You can check the conference programme here

#JanewayOA23

University of Tennessee joins OLH LPS Model

“We are pleased to announce that the University of Tennessee, Knoxville has joined the Open Library of Humanities’ (OLH) Library Partnership Subsidy system. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is the flagship land-grant university of the state of Tennessee. Founded as Blount College in 1794, two years before Tennessee became a state, UT Knoxville has grown into the state’s premier public research institution, holding the Carnegie Foundation’s highest designation, granted to doctoral universities with very high research activity. Today the university offers more than 900 undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of studies to its more than 33,000 enrolled students. …”

News – OLH Executive Director Caroline Edwards Elected to the OASPA Board of Directors

“We are delighted to announce that our Executive Director and co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities Dr Caroline Edwards has been elected to the OASPA Board of Directors. She and three other newly elected members will begin their 3-year term in September 2023. The other elected members include Susan Murray from African Journals Online, Sofie Wennström from Stockholm University Press, and Juan Pablo Alperin from the Public Knowledge Project, who has been re-elected.”

News – Nominations now open for the OLH Library Board

“As part of our 2023-2030 plan for sustainable growth of the OLH, we are pleased to announce that the OLH Library Board is being re-constituted as one of three elected Advisory Boards. 

As a strictly not-for-profit publisher with no shareholders, the OLH exists purely for the intellectual and academic good of the research that we publish. This mission is shared by hundreds of stakeholders who work closely with us in extending diamond open access to the humanities – including scholars, librarians, students, other publishers, and open-source activists. We are governed by a Board of Trustees and three advisory boards: the Academic Advisory Board, the Library Board and the Publishing Technology Board. The boards meet bi-annually to review the OLH’s overall performance, discuss research and development for different user groups, vote on strategic and operational issues, and liaise with relevant stakeholders….”

News – The University of Delaware Joins OLH LPS Model

“We are pleased to announce that the University of Delaware has joined the Open Library of Humanities’ (OLH) Library Partnership Subsidy system. With roots dating back to 1743, the University of Delaware is one of the oldest universities in the U.S. Originally founded as a seminary in New London, Pennsylvania, the school had relocated and gone through several name changes before it officially became known as the University of Delaware in 1921. Since 1950, the University’s enrollment has quadrupled, and it continues to expand by becoming a world-class Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) university. Today the University has an enrollment of almost 24,000, and consists of 10 colleges and schools and hosts 80 research centers. The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press operates five libraries, four special collections and museum galleries, and a university press that publishes scholarly works for researchers. The library’s collection includes more than 3.5 million print books and bound periodicals as well as more than 1 million e-books and journals. In addition to this, it is a federal depository library, which means it provides free access to information from the federal government.

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 28 journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Professor Peter Baldwin, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors. …”

News – The OLH Open Access Award 2023: call for applications

“We welcome applications that further our commitment to creating an open access scholarly environment within academia and beyond, and reflect our mission: to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever.  

Applications for OLH funding of up to £500 are welcomed from individuals or organisations in any location, and may be used to help fund events, projects or activities on open access or with an open access component, or other related costs that will be considered on a case-by-case basis in accordance with need and feasibility. 

Please note that the award is for projects that will promote open access within the humanities disciplines as widely as possible, and so will not be awarded to pay for individual Article Processing Charges (APCs) or article fees….”

A Year with the Open Library of Humanities

Lindsey Beth Zelvin is the CHASE Editorial, Marketing and Technical Intern for the Open Library of Humanities. She is coming to the end of a yearlong placement with OLH which she began in November 2021. Lindsey is in the second year of her PhD in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Her work investigates the methodologies and ethical responsibilities involved in creating narrative representations of chronic mental illness. She is currently writing a hybrid memoir of her own lived experience with anorexia, anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

FinELib partners with the Open Library of Humanities – FinELib

“FinELib and the not-for-profit Open Library of Humanities have signed a three-year (2022–2024) agreement that provides support for OLH through its Library Partnership Subsidy Model.

The partnership with OLH is FinELib’s first with a scholar-led diamond OA publisher.

Journals that have joined OLH include Glossa: a journal of general linquistics, Ethnologia Europaea, Architectural Histories as well as OLH’s flagship journal, the multidisciplinary Open Library of Humanities Journal….”

News – Four universities from the FinELib consortium join the Open Library of Humanities library partnership subsidy model

“We are pleased to announce that FinELib, a consortium of Finnish universities, research institutions, and public libraries have signed an agreement that provides support for the Open Library of Humanities from four of their member institutions: Abo Akademi University, University of Eastern Finland, University of Helsinki and University of Jyväskylä. ”

Janeway Systems partners with three more institutions to migrate their journals

“We are very pleased to announce that Janeway, our in-house publishing platform, has partnered with three more institutions to migrate their journals: Ghent University Library, the University of Iowa Libraries and Washington University in St Louis. These three new partnerships with Janeway will provide publishing infrastructure for the submission, curation, processing and preservation of the open access journals published at these institutions….”

News – Call for Special Collections!

“The Open Library of Humanities journal (OLHJ) is currently seeking new Special Collections to join our wide array of published research in the Humanities.  

OLHJ has published quality, peer-reviewed research across 40 Special Collections since 2016, with subjects ranging from ‘The Working-Class Avant-Garde’, to ‘Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century’, and more recently ‘The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish campaign to End Period Poverty’. 

There are many benefits of publishing a Special Collection with OLHJ, including: ….”

News – OLH annual report 2021

“The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 28 journals based in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. We are part of a community of scholar-led, community-owned and non-profit publishing ecosystem that are exploring different business models and innovative approaches to open access publishing that are adapted to the needs, in this case, of academics in the humanities. The platform was launched in 2015 by Birkbeck academics Professor Martin Eve and Dr Caroline Edwards and has been operating as an independent charity until May 2021, which is when the platform merged with the university. The decision to merge was taken, specifically, to protect the “academic-led” quality of the organisation and to protect the charity from financial and personnel risks.

With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Professor Peter Baldwin, the platform currently covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors….

Part of the OLH model that makes it so appealing lies in our journal ‘flipping’ programme, where we have sought to convert existing subscription titles to an open access model without fees. In September 2021 OLH re-opened its journal flipping programme and remains open to expressions of interest from subscription journals in the humanities seeking to move to a gold open access (OA) publishing model without author-facing charges (‘diamond’ OA). …”