The University of Göttingen joins OLH LPS model

We are very pleased to announce that the University of Göttingen has joined the Open Library of Humanities’ Library Partnership Subsidy system. The University of Göttingen is a research-led university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded in 1734 by George II, King of Great Britain and Elector of Hanover, it is the oldest university in the state of Lower Saxony and the largest in student enrolment, which stands at around 31,600. Home to many noted figures, it represents one of Germany's historic and traditional institutions. Among its alumni, faculty members or researchers are 44 Nobel Prize winners including physicists Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Otto Stern.

One of the most noteworthy institutions within the university is the Göttingen State and University Library (German: Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, or SUB Göttingen). With around 9 million media units and precious manuscripts, the library serves Göttingen University as well as the German State of Lower Saxony and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, founded as the Royal Society for Sciences. One of the largest German academic libraries, it has numerous national as well as international projects in areas regarding information infrastructure or open science and open access transformation. 

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, gold open-access publisher of 28 journals with no author-facing charges. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Dr Lisbet Rausing and Professor Peter Baldwin, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors.

Paula Clemente Vega, Marketing Officer for the Open Library of Humanities, welcomed the University of Göttingen: "We are very pleased to welcome the University of Göttingen to our library board. The University of Göttingen is one of the most prestigious German universities and humanities scholars from the university have long been publishing in our journals, particularly in Glossa. It's always great to see that this participation is transformed into more library support.  With the help of the University of Göttingen we’ll continue to provide high-quality OA in the humanities, without ever asking authors to pay."

The SUB Göttingen has long been committed to open and innovative publishing opportunities for researchers at the Göttingen Campus. "By joining the Open Library of Humanities, our library aims to support researchers in the humanities by exploring novel models of publishing. The culture of publishing in the humanities is specific and requires approaches that are different from other mainstream fields of scholarly communication. We want to actively participate in exploring transformation processes," says Prof. Dr. Wolfram Horstmann, Director of Göttingen State and University Library. "Horstmann is convinced that open infrastructures with a not-for-profit orientation, anchored in institutional responsibilities, are particularly important, and that using these a cross-disciplinary, open and networked publication ecosystem could be created."

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/.