Open Library of Humanities Wins Small Digital Publisher of the Year

We’re delighted to announce that the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) has won the award for Small Digital Publisher of the Year at the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) Digital Publishing Awards 2020 virtual ceremony, celebrated yesterday in London. We would like to send a huge thank you to the judges, and many congratulations to all the winners and all those highly commended in the other 25 categories. The OLH was also shortlisted as a finalist of the Best Digital Publishing Innovation category.

The Open Library of Humanities is a scholar-led charitable organisation dedicated to publishing world-leading open access humanities scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges. Launched in 2015, our free-to-read, free-to-publish model was set up to revolutionise the field of open access publishing. Five years on, our sustainable business model has attracted nearly 300 supporting institutions, with further revenue generated through hosting on our in-house open source publishing platform Janeway, enabling us to establish a thriving platform of 28 peer-reviewed open access journals. Our mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities - for free, for everyone, for ever.

Professor Martin Paul Eve, co-CEO of the OLH, said: “We are delighted and honoured to have been awarded this prize by the Association of Online Publishers. It is a testament to the platform and all those who work on it that we have gone from nothing to industry-wide recognition in just five short years. As we pass our half-decade mark, our work remains as vital as ever. We hope that our supporting libraries will continue to partner with us to deliver a fairer vision for open access in the humanities disciplines.”

Dr Rose Harris-Birtill, Managing Editor of the OLH, added, “It is brilliant to see such well-deserved recognition for the OLH’s incredibly talented team. I’d like to add my thanks to all our authors, editors and readers for their continued support, to our member libraries that make the vital work that we do possible, and the OLH team for all their outstanding work: co-founders Professor Martin Paul Eve and Dr Caroline Edwards, Marketing Officer Paula Clemente Vega, and Senior Publishing Technology Developers Andy Byers and Mauro Sanchez.”

The AOP Digital Publishing Awards are the only awards specifically designed to celebrate the work of the individuals and teams who fuel the success of the UK’s digital publishing sector. The awards programme, hosted in partnership with PubMatic, champions talent and excellence across 26 categories. Judged by a panel of industry experts and senior publishing executives, the winners were announced during a virtual ceremony on Thursday 15th October 2020 by comedian, writer and actor Ellie Taylor.

The Open Library of Humanities was awarded Small Digital Publisher of the Year in recognition of our successful business model, our lasting and fundamental change within the academic open access publishing sector, and our vision to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities without publications fees.

The award was announced by Fiona Tully, who noted, “I’m delighted to announce the winner of the Small Digital Publisher of the Year category. It’s rare to see publishing innovation that goes beyond commercial success and has a higher purpose, which in this case, was to create lasting and fundamental change within their own sector. The winning publisher turned a classical business model on its head, and drove rapid audience and business growth in the process. They had a vision, which in their words, was to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – in short, to deliver content for free, for everyone, for ever.” 

About AOP

The UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) is an industry body representing digital publishing companies that create original, branded, quality content. AOP champions the interests of media owners from diverse backgrounds including newspaper and magazine publishing, TV and radio broadcasting, and pure online media. Formed in 2002, AOP publishes original research, hosts forums, awards and conferences, covering a range of topics including programmatic advertising, native advertising, the value of data, content models, cross device and mobile specific development, affiliate commerce, video and other key topics. 

For more information and to see the complete list of awarded projects and initiatives, please visit: https://www.ukaop.org/awards2020/awards2020.

If you like the work that the Open Library of Humanities is doing, please consider asking your institution to support us financially. We cannot operate without our library members. More details for libraries can be found here: https://www.openlibhums.org/plugins/supporters/signup/.