OLH welcomes the University of Aberdeen as a bronze super-supporter

Posted by Paula Clemente Vega on 30 November 2021

We are very pleased to announce that we have recently welcomed a new bronze super-supporter to our library board, the University of Aberdeen. Founded in 1495, the University of Aberdeen is Scotland's third oldest university and the fifth oldest in the UK. With more than 14,000 students from many corners of the world the university offers Bachelor, Masters and PhD programmes in a great variety of disciplines ranging from Arts & Humanities, Business, Social Sciences and Law to Engineering, Geosciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Medicine. As a new OLH higher supporter, the University of Aberdeen has been awarded a bronze 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.

"We are very pleased to have the support of the University of Aberdeen", said Paula Clemente Vega, Marketing Officer for the Open Library of Humanities. "Many institutions have voluntary opted to support OLH at a higher rate in the last few months and we are very grateful for their generous contribution. This will allow us to keep our flipping programme open, giving the possibility to a variety of subscription journals to continue moving to open access through the Open Library of Humanities non-APC consortial funding model." 

“I am absolutely delighted to be able to support OLH and have long been an admirer”, said Simon Bains, University Librarian and Head of Library Services. “The University of Aberdeen was founded in 1495 on the principle of being ‘Open to All’, and the University has recently committed to Open Research in the ‘Aberdeen 2040’ strategy. The Library plays a huge part in shaping how our research is published and initiatives like OLH help us deliver on our open research commitment.”


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).