The Open Library of Humanities welcomes Iowa State University as a higher tier supporter

We are very pleased to announce that we have recently welcomed a new higher-tier supporter to our library board.  Iowa State University Library is a signatory of the Open Access 2020 Initiative and is active in national and international efforts to advance open access. As part of a land-grant university with a mission to create, share, and apply knowledge to make Iowa and the world a better place, the University Library works to ensure the free dissemination and preservation of the university’s research and scholarly outputs.

Iowa State University has been supporting the Open Library of Humanities since 2018 as a regular supporter and has voluntarily decided to increase its membership rate in order to contribute to the expanding of our portfolio of open access journals. 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. Institutions, worldwide, can also contribute at a higher level to facilitate flipping journals to open access. Iowa State University is the second institution from outside the UK that is contributing at a higher membership rate. Thanks to this contribution and the other 12 higher supporters, we will be able to continue expanding portfolio of diamond open access via our journal flipping programme, which is currently welcoming expressions of interest from subscription journals interested in becoming open access. 

By supporting more subscription journals to transition to open access, we aim to ensure the open availability of knowledge as broadly as possible, as per our charitable aims and core mission. These criteria are in place to help create savings for library budgets, to stimulate the commercial business sector to adopt new models for open access scholarship, and to ensure the highest journal quality for our supporting members.

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). Institutions in the UK can become higher-tier supporters through Jisc’s signup system.