James Madison University joins OLH LPS Model

We are pleased to announce that James Madison University has joined the Open Library of Humanities’ (OLH) Library Partnership Subsidy system. Founded in 1908, James Madison University (JMU) is a public university located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. JMU offers 139 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs to over 22,000 students. JMU’s membership in the OLH was led by JMU Libraries, a blended library and educational technology organization responsible for providing scholarly communications expertise, delivering and fostering the effective use of educational technologies, and offering library services and resources. 

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 28 journals. 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’re delighted to have the support of James Madison University,” said Paula Clemente Vega, Marketing Officer for the Open Library of Humanities. “OLH is funded by a consortial funding model in which institutions pool their resources in order to facilitate diamond open access in the humanities. It is thanks to this kind of institutional support that we can continue to expand our economically-effective OA model and ensure that nobody is charged for reading or publishing in our journals. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all our member institutions for making this vital work possible.”

“Supporting OLH aligns with our sustainable scholarship commitment to engage with information vendors that emphasize open access, transparency in pricing, and financially viable business models. This innovative approach to humanities scholarship support is critical to sustainable engagement,” said Yasmeen Shorish, JMU Libraries’ Directory of Scholarly Communications Strategies. “It is great to be able to invest in a community-led scholarly enterprise that eliminates the author-pays model of open access, which broadens participation in the creation and readership of research.” 

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/.