OLH welcomes the University of Sussex as a silver super-supporter

We are very pleased to announce that we have recently welcomed the University of Sussex to our library board as a new silver super-supporter. A leading research university, the University of Sussex was the first of the new wave of UK universities founded in the 1960s, receiving its Royal Charter in August 1961. The university has a diverse community of nearly 20,000 students, with around one in three being foreign students, and over 1,000 academics, representing over 140 different nationalities. Sussex counts 5 Nobel Prize winners, 15 Fellows of the Royal Society, 10 Fellows of the British Academy, 24 fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences and a winner of the Crafoord Prize among its faculty. 

The University of Sussex has been supporting the Open Library of Humanities as a regular supporter for a number of years and has decided to increase its membership rate in order to contribute to the expanding of our portfolio of journals. In 2021 we launched a new agreement with Jisc Collections, which included higher tiers of financial support for our UK institutional library partners to voluntarily increase their annual contributions at Gold, Silver and Bronze levels. This higher support enables the OLH to expand our portfolio of diamond open access journals. Gold, silver and bronze tier support is also available to universities worldwide who would like to contribute at a higher fee to facilitate the flipping of subscription journals to open access. We currently have 18 higher-tier supporters, most of whom have joined in the past two years.

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.

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 28 journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. 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/.