The Open Library of Humanities welcomes its first five new higher tier supporters

We are delighted to announce that we have recently welcomed our first five new higher tier super-supporters to our library board: King's College London, The Open University, University College London (UCL), University of Sheffield and University of York. These five super-supporters are the first to be awarded one of our new badges in recognition of their invaluable contribution to furthering vital work in open access scholarship.

This additional support, facilitated through our recently launched Jisc Collections OLH offer for UK institutions, will enable us to continue one of our core missions: to convert subscription journals to a sustainable open-access model with no author-facing charges. 

Under this new agreement, UK universities are given the opportunity to voluntarily support us at a higher membership rate tiered into Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels. In the coming months, this will allow us to re-open our journal flipping programme to grow our portfolio of open access journals, and make even more world-leading scholarship freely available to all. Flipping journals will yield benefits not only for the titles that choose to join us and convert to open access, but will also escalate pressure on other publishers to adopt models for equitable open access that allow greater knowledge sharing worldwide.

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, 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.

“We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the universities that have voluntary opted to support us at a higher level”, said Paula Clemente Vega, Marketing Officer for the Open Library of Humanities. “It is deeply gratifying to see libraries who can, in the face of budgetary austerity, still find ways to support scholar-led and non-APC models for open access in the humanities.”

Dr Rose Harris-Birtill, Acting Director of the Open Library of Humanities, added: “We are absolutely delighted to be able to welcome King's College London, the Open University, University College London, the University of Sheffield and University of York as our first five new higher tier super-supporters. By providing this generous extra support to help us make even more journals open access, this vital funding will allow us to continue our mission: to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever.”

Institutions in the UK can become higher-tier supporters through Jisc’s signup system. Universities, worldwide, who wish to contribute at a higher-tier level to facilitate flipping journals to open access should contact Paula Clemente Vega (paula.clementevega@openlibhums.org).