Saarland University joins OLH LPS model

We are very pleased to announce that Saarland University has joined the Open Library of Humanities' Library Partnership Subsidy system. Saarland University is a public university located in Saarbrücken, Germany. The university was established in 1948 in the nearby town of Homburg with the support of the French government and under the control of the University of Nancy. Because of its history, the university offers instruction in both the French and German languages. The university is particularly well known for research and education in computer science, computational linguistics and materials science consistently ranking among the top in the country in those fields. Well-known alumni of Saarland University include physician David Bardens, scientist Susanne Albers, philosopher Karl-Otto Apel and the historian Michael Wolffsohn. Nine academics have been honored with the highest German research prize, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, while working at Saarland University. They include Joachim Weickert, who won the award in 2010 for digital image processing; Hans-Peter Seidel, who won it for computer graphics in 2003; and Manfred Pinkal, who won the award in 2000 for his work on computational linguistics.

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.

Paula Clemente Vega, Marketing Officer for the Open Library of Humanities, welcomed Saarland University: “We’re very pleased to welcome Saarland University on board. It’s great to see that increasingly more institutions are joining the OLH to support sustainable non-APC open access publishing models. With the help of Saarland University we’ll continue to provide high-quality OA in the humanities, without ever asking authors to pay.”

Dr. Ulrich Herb, Publishing & Research Support, added: “As long-standing Open Access protagonists who, for example, operated the first disciplinary Open Access Repository in Germany, our library is pleased that our university was able to provide the resources to support an Open Access service such as OLH, which has very crucial and distinctive features: a non-commercial approach and the promotion of Open Access in the social sciences and humanities - combined with high standards for the quality of its publications.”