First subscription journal flips to open access through OLH

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 29 May 2015

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
 

The Open Library of Humanities is extremely pleased to announce that the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry will be the first subscription journal to move to the completely open-access model offered by the OLH. The journal, previously published by Gylphi, centres on the poetic writings that have appeared in Britain and Ireland since the late 1950s under various categorizations, for example: avant-garde, underground, linguistically innovative, second-wave Modernist, non-mainstream, the British Poetry Revival, the parallel tradition, formally innovative, neo-modernist and experimental, while also including the Cambridge School, the London School, concrete poetry, and performance writing.

The Open Library of Humanities is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded gold open-access publication platform. Unlike many gold open-access publishers, however, the OLH has no author-facing charges and is instead funded by an international consortium of libraries through the Library Partnership Subsidies model. The platform is open to existing journals who wish to move to a sustainable gold open-access publication mode. This includes journals currently operating on article processing charges, on an unsustainable volunteerist basis, and subscription publications.

Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London and a founder of the OLH, said: “While we have a range of journals lined up for launch later this year, it is most exciting to begin to move high-quality humanities journals away from subscription models and into a mode where readers can access material without being excluded by an inability to pay. That the first journal to do so in our model bears a title including 'innovation' is perhaps poetic. We are, therefore, delighted that the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry will soon be available for all to read.”

Scott Thurston, Gareth Farmer and Vicky Sparrow, the journal's editors, added: “This move to a fully open-access platform with the OLH is a game-changing moment for the journal in its sixth year of operations. It also coincides happily with new arrivals on our editorial team. We've had a fantastic time in our inaugural home at Gylphi and will be eternally grateful to Anthony Levings for helping to bring the journal into existence in the first place and for supporting the move. That our new form is open-access (and free of author-charges) sits particularly well with the ethos of a journal so concerned with liberated and liberating writing, and we hope the move will open our work up to a wider community of thinkers. We are all thrilled about the potential for this new phase of operations and keen to experiment!”

Journals wishing to join the platform should submit an initial enquiry to martin.eve@openlibhums.org. Applications will be be subject to the platform's joining procedure. 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.