HEAL-Link Consortium of 43 Greek institutions joins OLH LPS Model

We are delighted  to announce that the HEAL-Link Consortium of 43 Greek institutions has come together through the OLH Open Consortial Offer to join the Open Library of Humanities partnership model. HEAL-Link (Hellenic Academic Libraries Link) is the Consortium for Academic and Research Institutions in Greece. It is also the largest consortium that has joined the OLH platform so far, comprising a total of 43 members, including all Greek academic institutions and 15 research centres. The Consortium was founded in 1998 with the aim of ensuring access to research publications for the research and academic community in Greece, and since then it has been actively involved in numerous projects, initiatives and developments within the academic publication landscape. HEAL-Link has achieved direct contacts, negotiations and final agreements with prestigious academic journals, electronic resources and publishers, facilitating and providing online access to electronic content in subject areas related to the research and educational needs of the Consortium’s members. 

The Open Library of Humanities is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With initial 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, said: “We are extremely grateful for the initiative taken here by HEAL-Link institutions. It is always wonderful to see that institutions are uniting to support alternative publishing models for Open Access. With this move, we also warmly welcome a new country, Greece, to our international library community, represented now by all of its academic institutions and most important research centres. This move was made possible thanks to our Open Consortial Offer, an initiative that offers consortia, societies, networks and scholarly projects the opportunity to join the Open Library of Humanities Library Partnership Subsidy system as a bloc, enabling each institution to benefit from a discount. The Open Library of Humanities is now supported by nearly 300 institutions which have pooled their resources in order to facilitate fee-free Open Access publishing in the humanities. The more libraries that support us, the more that we can continue to ensure our future ongoing viability in service of the academic community. With the support, these institutions are contributing to building a leading alternative to the APC model, which is both unsustainable for the majority of humanities scholars and the budgets of most universities in the context of the serial crisis.”