OLH welcomes the University of Manchester as a gold super-supporter

We are very pleased to announce that we have recently welcomed a new gold super-supporter to our library board, the University of Manchester. Part of the prestigious Russell Group of universities, the University of Manchester is a highly respected centre of teaching excellence and innovative research across the globe. The university has been awarded a gold super-supporter badge in recognition of its invaluable and generous contribution to furthering vital work in open access scholarship.

In May 2021 we launched our new agreement with Jisc Collections, giving UK institutions the opportunity to voluntarily support us at a higher level (either Gold, Silver or Bronze) enabling us to expand our portfolio of open access journals. This additional funding has allowed us to re-open our journal flipping programme this past September 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.

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 at: https://www.openlibhums.org/plugins/supporters/signup/.

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).