OLH features in a European Commission report on business models for sustainable non-for-profit OA publishing

OLH features in a European Commission report on business models for sustainable non-for-profit OA publishing

The Open Library of Humanities is very honoured to have been showcased in a European Commission report on business models for sustainable non-for-profit OA publishing. The report, "Operationalising Open Research Europe as a collective publishing enterprise" published in October 2022, was commissioned by the European Commission for their Open Research Europe (ORE) publishing platform. OLH is one of the seven case studies of this study alongside SciELO, Open Edition, Europe PMC, OAPEN, eLife and SCOAP3. You can access the full report here.

About ORE: Open Research Europe (ORE) is the open access peer-reviewed publishing platform currently offered by the European Commission as an optional service to Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries at no cost to them. The platform enables researchers to publish open access without paying out of their research budgets and to comply with their open access obligations. 

The European Commission is exploring the potential to gradually expand ORE from a publication platform for EC beneficiaries only, into a not-for-profit European publishing platform for all, with the involvement of funders from EU Member States and possibly beyond. The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) commissioned this independent expert analysis to provide direction with regard to the organizational and financing model(s) that may be used in this collective future endeavour as of 2026. 

The main goals of the report are: 

•  to provide an analysis of business models relevant for not-for-profit publishing; 

•  to propose one (or more) specific appropriate models for ORE, providing information and examples of how financial flows would work within the preferred model; and 

•  to provide concrete recommendations on operationalising such a model. 

About OLH: 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, without charging readers or authors.

Dr Caroline Edwards, Director of the OLH, said: “We’re delighted to be featured in the independent report commissioned by ORE into sustainable business models for open access publishing. It’s nearly 10 years since we founded the OLH as a not-for-profit publisher governed by scholars and librarians and our experience demonstrates that academic-owned publishing is the best way to ensure equitable open access. Ensuring that the digital infrastructure remains open source is the only way to protect open access publishing from proprietary takeovers and secure the future of open scholarship for generations to come.”

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/.

Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash