Article in the OLH flagship journal wins the Elizabeth Eisenstein Essay Prize

We are delighted to announce that Dr Janet Smith has been awarded the 2021 Elizabeth Eisenstein Essay Prize for her article published in the OLH journal.

The article "Crossing the Border of Citizenship: Helen Taylor, the Independent Radical Democrat Candidate for Camberwell North, 1885" explores the campaign of Helen Taylor to become the first woman MP in the British Parliament. It appears in the OLH Special Collection Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain edited by Dr Daniel Grey (University of Hertfordshire) and Dr Jacqui Turner (University of Reading).

The Elizabeth Eisenstein Essay Prize is awarded annually for the best peer-reviewed article/book chapter by an NCIS member, and is jointly funded by the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS) and the family of Professor Elizabeth Eisenstein. Subject to publishers' permissions, the winning essays are republished in the NCIS OA peer-reviewed journal The Independent Scholar.

The OLH is the flagship journal of the Open Library of Humanities, an award-winning, academic-led, gold open-access publisher 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.

Dr Rose Harris-Birtill, Acting Director of the Open Library of Humanities and Managing Editor of OLH journal, said: "It’s always brilliant to see award-winning open access scholarship in our journals, and the impressive quality of the research in the OLH journal is testament both to the hard work put in by our authors and by the journal’s special collection editors, who work tirelessly to bring the final articles to publication. A huge congratulations to Dr Janet Smith from us all at the Open Library of Humanities for receiving the prestigious Elizabeth Eisenstein Essay Prize, and very well done also to Dr Daniel Grey and Dr Jacqui Turner for all their efforts editing the special collection, ‘Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain’."

Dr Janet Smith, the author of the awarded article commented: "I was thrilled to accept this award, not only because it puts a spotlight on an overlooked achievement of Helen Taylor, but also for the attention it brings to the Astor 100 project. It was an honour to be included in the collection and I would like to say a special thank you to the project leaders Dr Jacqui Turner and Dr Daniel Grey for their invaluable advice and support during the writing."

This is not the first time that a prize has been awarded to articles published in the Open Library of Humanities's journals. For example, in 2017, an article in the Comics Grid was awarded the prestigious Rebecca Coyle Prize, and in 2016 an article in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century was awarded the Donald Gray Prize.

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