Inaugural Open Library of Humanities Award

We were delighted to be able to launch our new Open Library of Humanities Award at the recent two-day international symposium on Janeway and open access publishing, The Lower Decks, held at Birkbeck, University of London on 7-8 September 2023.

The inaugural Open Library of Humanities Award 2023 was awarded to Prof. Martin Paul Eve. Martin's outstanding record of scholarly research is matched by a deep commitment to principles of open access and the protection of community-led open source publishing technologies. Martin co-founded the OLH in 2013 with Dr Caroline Edwards and went on to work widely in open access and HE policy. He has appeared before the UK House of Commons Select Committee BIS Inquiry into Open Access, writing for the British Academy Policy Series on the topic, been a steering-group member of the OAPEN-UK project, the Jisc National Monograph Strategy Group, the SCONUL Strategy Group on Academic Content and Communications, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Access Steering Group, the Jisc Scholarly Communications Advisory Group, the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation advisory board, the California Digital Library/University of California Press’s Humanities Book Infrastructure advisory board, and the HEFCE Open Access Monographs Expert Reference Panel (2014), the Universities UK OA Monographs Working Group (2016-). Martin is a Plan S Ambassador and is currently running Work Package 3 of the COPIM project, funded by Research England and the Arcadia Foundation.

As a result of this policy work, Martin was named as one of the Guardian’s five finalists for higher education’s most inspiring leader 2017. In 2018, Martin was awarded the KU Leuven Medal of Honour in the Humanities and Social Sciences and alongside co-contributors and the editor won the Electronic Literature Organization’s N. Katherine Hayles Award for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. In 2020, Martin was elected a Fellow of the English Association. In 2021, Martin was named by the Shaw Trust as one of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK. Martin is also the developer of several digital humanities / computational projects. In 2018 he co-founded Janeway with Andy Byers, the OLH's in-house open source digital publishing platform.

Martin's academic career has been equally illustrious. He is the author of twelve academic monographs on topics ranging from contemporary American and British fiction, histories and philosophies of technology, evaluative cultures in the academy, and technological mutations in scholarly publishing. Martin has also co-edited two essay collections on scholarly communications. In 2019, Martin was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for Literary Studies by the Leverhulme Trust. Martin is currently Principal R&D Developer at CrossRef, working on experimental research and development projects for Labs. He is also the Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London.

The Open Library of Humanities Award seeks to recognise and honour individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of open scholarship. We are indebted to Martin for his pioneering work at the OLH and believe him to be an extremely worthy recipient of our inaugural award. By acknowledging the outstanding efforts of individuals, the Open Library of Humanities Award aims to recognise the value of individual endeavours in open access and encourage others to actively engage in the promotion of open scholarship and its principles.

Each year the award will be granted to a person who demonstrates dedication to open scholarship through their advocacy, projects, or scholarly work that has been published openly. The award aims to thank and encourage these champions of openness and inspire the academic community to embrace and support the principles of open access to knowledge for the benefit of all. 

Our congratulations to Martin. Here are some pictures of the award ceremony taken in September 2023.