University of Cologne joins OLH LPS model

We are extremely pleased to announce that the University of Cologne has joined the Open Library of Humanities' Library Partnership Subsidy system. Since its establishment in 1388, the University of Cologne has been a center of science and scholarship in Europe. With its 50.000 students, it is one of the leading German research universities. The University offers students an exceptionally broad and diverse subject base and encourages them to follow their own academic interests also through the services of the University and City Library Cologne. This allows them to develop both intellectually and personally. The University of Cologne is firmly committed to the advancement of human knowledge through basic research, but also provides an infrastructure fostering startups and entrepreneurship. This ensures the transfer and application of knowledge in other areas of society.

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.

Professor Martin Paul Eve, a founder and academic project director of the OLH, welcomed the University of Cologne: “We are very grateful for the support of the University of Cologne. It is great to see that increasingly more institutions are supporting sustainable non-APC open access publishing models. With the help of the University of Cologne we will continue to expand our vision for OA in the humanities, without charging authors, which is the number one barrier to uptake for humanities scholars.”

Dr. Hubertus Neuhausen, director of the University and City Library Cologne, added: “We are very happy to give the students and researchers in the humanities this great opportunity to get access to a lot of journals, and to support them in publishing without additional charges. Supporting the OLH model is an important step for us on our way towards Open Access.”