Winners of the OLH Open Access Award 2023 announced
Posted by Paula Clemente Vega on 16 November 2023
Winners of the OLH Open Access Award 2023 announced
Earlier this year, the Open Library of Humanities announced the OLH Open Access Award 2023, a fund dedicated to promoting the benefits and impact of open access to humanities scholars and disciplines and to knowledge worldwide. Our OLH Open Access awards have been awarded to three organisations and individuals in recognition for their invaluable commitment to open access. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who applied. The winners are announced below:
‘Data papers’: Maximising potential and getting recognition and rewards for sharing humanities data.
‘Data papers’ is a hybrid event organised by the University College Cork in March 2024 to help raise awareness of the benefits of openly sharing humanities data in the wider academic community. The award will be used to help fund the half-day event held at the Library at UCC with both in person and online speakers. The event will showcase the concept of the ‘data paper’ as a way of maximising potential and getting recognition and rewards for sharing humanities data. A data paper makes other researchers aware of data that has been published and allows a researcher to give further context to their data and the way it has been generated or gathered, managed, and prepared for sharing. The data paper enhances and signposts shared data, and it also complements the research article. As such, this type of publishing forms synergies between the areas of ‘managing and sharing data’ and ‘publishing research’.
Dr Deborah Thorpe, Research Data Service, University College Cork (UCC) commented: "We at UCC are excited about this event, which will celebrate researchers who are sharing data in the arts and humanities, encourage more researchers to engage with FAIR and open data sharing, and showcase the idea of writing data papers as a practice that helps to diversify research outputs. We are grateful for the support of Open Library of Humanities, and hope to also use our event to further raise the profile of OLH within University College Cork."
Grassroots, Journal of Political Ecology.
Grassroots is a new open-access platform of the Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) that provides a space for grassroots initiatives/movements and academics to engage in political ecology debates. The platform features peer-reviewed articles, activist commentaries, collaborative/engaged scholarship, and visual essays examining local resource governance, human-nonhuman relationships, and strategic alliances between grassroots movements alongside critical reflections on political ecology, political ontology and environmentalism. Grassroots aspires to amplify local voices, experiences, and reflections on the politics of environmental change and world-making, with a particular emphasis on discourses from the Global South. Currently, Grassroots publishes in three languages—English, French and Spanish. The funding from OLH will be used to enhance the platform’s digital infrastructure, specifically for the website’s maintenance, production and design, and to launch a podcast.
Meenakshi N Ambujam, Research Fellow at the Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and Editor (Southeast Asia) at Grassroots, said of the award: "My colleagues at Grassroots and I are extremely grateful for OLH’s support and belief in our project. The grant will allow us to revamp our digital infrastructure and add an audio component to our website—something we have wanted to do for a while now. This award, therefore, is a major boost to our plans, and we are grateful."
Post45
Post45 is a diamond open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that publishes high quality, field-shaping work on American literature and culture since the mid-twentieth century. The journal publishes themed special issues and standalone articles continuously to ensure reasonable publication timelines commensurate with the profession’s escalating demands, particularly on junior scholars. The online format allows for the inclusion of film clips, audio, images, and other digital objects. The funding from the OLH will be used to launch two article prize competitions during the 2023-2024 academic year: one for early career scholars and one for contingent scholars. The OLH Open Access Award will help boost Post45’s profile and reputation as a leading literary studies journal and one of the United States’ small but growing number of diamond open access humanities journals.
Post45 co-editors Annie McClanahan, Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine, and Arthur Z. Wang, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication commented: "We’re grateful to the Open Library of Humanities for enabling our efforts to expand Post45’s reach as an open-access humanities journal. The article prize competition we’ve launched with OLH’s support will help us highlight the crucial work of emerging and contingent scholars in our field, while also publicising the benefits of our open-access publishing model. This award marks the first of several initiatives to build stronger and more accessible networks of scholarly communication, support, and mentoring in the Post45 community."
About OLH:
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.
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