OLH article on the Chronicle of Higher Education

We're delighted that the OLH has been receiving a widespread level of attention within the first week of the launch of our new website. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article on the project, which featured as their top news story of the day. As Jennifer Howard writes:

Open access isn't just for scientists. Opening up research is an idea that appeals to more and more humanists and social scientists. The trick has been how those fields can support the open sharing of research.

Several recent publishing ventures and platforms, including the Open Humanities Press and Anvil Academic, are investigating how to bring more open-access journals and monographs online. A brand-spanking-new nonprofit organization, called the Open Library of Humanities, aims to create a humanities-and-social-sciences version of the successful Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which in the past decade has established itself as a major presence in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific publishing. Like PLoS, the Open Library of Humanities, or OLH, will be peer-reviewed. "For me, there was an itch, a frustration: Why are we always talking about science?" says Tim McCormick, one of the three founders of the new venture. "I'm sure that it has probably crossed the minds of many people, and a number of people have said to me, 'I've always thought there should be a PLoS for humanities.'"

Mr. McCormick hails from the publishing-and-technology worlds. He used to be a senior product manager for Stanford University's HighWirePress; he's now a consultant with Stanford's MediaX, which encourages tech collaborations between researchers and the business world. Mr. McCormick's OLH co-visionaries are academics: Caroline Edwards, a lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, in England, and Martin Paul Eve, also a lecturer in English at Lincoln who's also a computer programmer. Both Ms. Edwards and Mr. Eve have experience editing open-access journals in their fields.

You can read the article in full on the Chronicle's website.

Image by Mal Booth under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.