KU Leuven becomes first Belgian institution to sign up to OLH

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 16 February 2015

Book spine exhibition
 

We're delighted to be able to announce that the prestigious KU Leuven in Belgium has signed up to financially support the Open Library of Humanities. Visionary director of the Artes Library, Dr. Demmy Verbeke, has been a long-standing supporter of open access publishing and has received the support of his colleagues of the Library Board of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Management Team of the University Library to join. We are delighted to be able to work with the university.

The OLH is funded through a system of library partnerships, in which a large number of libraries all pay a small amount so that we can cover the costs of publication. This means that we can publish open-access material in the humanities disciplines without the damaging author-facing charges that many others are pursuing.

Dr. Martin Paul Eve, one of the founders and academic project directors of the OLH, welcomed KU Leuven: “we are extremely pleased KU Leuven has joined the OLH Library Partnership model. We are, of course, only at the beginning of the transformation of scholarly communications through the internet – open access – and building strong, successful, mission-driven publishers is not a short-term effort. With support from institutions like KU Leuven, though, we can secure a better, more open future for research work in the humanities”.

Dr. Demmy Verbeke added: “we are very happy that the efforts we already do in the fields of the so-called hard sciences, are now also extended to include the humanities and the social sciences. We had been looking for a sustainable way to increase our open access efforts and we strongly believe that the model of the OLH is the most attractive one we have come across in our discipline. We therefore embrace the possibility to pay our modest contribution towards its success”.

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 will shortly be able to join through Jisc Collections. US-based libraries can join through LYRASIS at https://lyrasis.openlibhums.org.