Four subscription journals to flip to fee-free OA with the OLH in January 2016

We are very pleased to announce that four journals are to move away from a subscription environment into a pure open access mode with support from the Open Library of Humanities and the OLH library consortia. This follows the first OLH Library Board vote, where 98% of votes cast were in favour of flipping all four journals.

In January 2016, C21: Journal of 21st-century Writings will move to the OLH platform. In addition, Laboratory Phonology, the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics and Glossa will be published by Ubiquity Press, moving to the OLH platform and model after the initial funding period. These latter journals are part of the LingOA initiative in which the OLH participates. LingOA is initially funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO and the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU), which substantially reduces costs for our members in the startup phase.

Glossa in particular has made headlines in recent weeks since it is to be run by the outgoing editors and editorial board of the Elsevier journal, Lingua. The editors and editorial board resigned from Lingua in protest at the publishing giant's inability to offer OA on the terms they wanted. This move has been widely praised with statements of support coming from linguistics departments and from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities.

Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a founder and academic project director of the OLH, said of the journal migrations: “this first vote by the OLH library board to admit four existing subscription journals demonstrates the success of our flipping model. By moving existing journals onto our platform, with no author fees, we will help to build a transition towards open access in the humanities. Of course, our model depends on the support of our library partner members and we hope that this demonstration will be the catalyst for the latest wave of signups. If you are an academic, please do consider asking your library to support our initiative. If you are a librarian, institution or funder, we would appreciate your support.”

The Open Library of Humanities is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee.

Existing journals wishing to move to the platform should submit an initial enquiry to martin.eve@openlibhums.org. Libraries outside the US and UK interested in joining the OLH Library Partnership Subsidy model should contact Dr. Martin Paul Eve: martin.eve@openlibhums.org. UK-based libraries can join through Jisc Collections at http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/Overview/Index/2120. US-based libraries can join through LYRASIS at https://lyrasis.openlibhums.org.