The OLH short-documentary is now online!

The Open Library of Humanities has been working together with the Derek Jarman Lab to produce a short-video about the OLH. The film, which was launched this week, is an interview-led documentary in which some Open Library of Humanities team members and key partners talk about the platform and discuss open access and the humanities, sustainable publishing models to support open access and the changing role of libraries within this new landscape of scholarly publishing.

The film features interviews with Martin Eve (Director of the Open Library of Humanities), Andy Byers (OLH Senior Publishing Technology Developer), Ernesto Priego (City UoL, Editor of The Comics Grid), Ross Mounce (Director of Open Access Programmes, Arcadia), Chris Banks (Director of Library Services, Imperial College), Caroline Magennis (University of Salford, Editor of Agreement 20 Special Collection) and Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Open Science Officer, DARIAH-EU), and a conversation between Paula Clemente Vega (OLH Marketing Officer) and Helen Saunders (OLH Editorial Officer).

The film is part of the OLH EmpowOA programme, an initiative launched in 2018 and designed to provide scholars and librarians working in the humanities with tools, spaces and cogent arguments about open access. The initiative comes with a collection of advocacy resources available online together with the video, the Open Insights blog post series featuring interviews and opinion pieces from a rich variety of scholars and librarians within the humanities OA communities and a series of Twitter conversations.

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). The OLH publishing platform supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal. Launched by Martin Eve and Caroline Edwards as an international network of scholars, librarians, programmers and publishers in 2015, the OLH has received two substantial grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to date, and has built a sustainable business model with its partner libraries.

The Derek Jarman Lab is the media hub at Birkbeck offering filmmaking training, support and facilities to its postgraduate students. The Lab is part of the Birkbeck Institute and is chaired by Colin MacCabe. The lab is also supported by the University of Pittsburgh.