Times Higher Education Article

The Times Higher Education has published an article today which examines the OLH's aim to "flip" subscription journals to open access via its Library Partnership Subsidy business model. The OLH is supported by an international consortium of research libraries who all contribute to cover the costs of its journal publishing. By joining this consortium, partner libraries also receive a governance stake in the OLH, voting on a quarterly basis on which subscription journals to accept onto the OLH publishing platform.

As David Matthews writes:

The attraction is simple: under every situation the OLH has modelled, libraries will pay less in contributions than they currently do for journal subscriptions, Eve claims. One obvious reason for the lower price is that OLH is not-for-profit, whereas commercial publishers are reputed to have profit margins of up to 40 per cent. And, Eve adds, “it gets better the larger the consortium”. If 300 institutions came on board, per-article costs would drop to $3.

Unlike some other open access ventures, the focus of the OLH is not on creating new, rival open access journals but rather on “flipping” existing ones.

Click here to read the article in full.

Featured image by Ian Sane under a CC BY license.