Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science flips to diamond open access with Open Library of Humanities

We are very pleased to welcome Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science to our portfolio of diamond open access journals. Launched in 1966, Zygon is a well-respected religious studies journal dedicated to the manifold interactions between the sciences, human religious and moral convictions. The journal covers the whole range of the sciences, including cosmology and physics, biology and the neurosciences, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Zygon seeks to be open to religious and non-religious perspectives, those rooted in the great traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, but also to religious naturalism, secular humanism, and atheism, both variants at home in the Western world and versions elsewhere on our globe. The journal covers ideas (theories, theologies) as well as practices. It addresses ethical issues and analyses the history of the differentiation between science and religion and their subsequent interactions.

Zygon is community-governed by a not-for-profit scholarly corporation established in Chicago in 2019, which succeeds a joint venture established in 1965 and has as its members: IRAS, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (1954), CASIRAS, the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (1972), and ISSR, the International Society for Science and Religion (2002). The journal was previously published by Wiley-Blackwell under a subscription-based model from 1989 to 2023. As of January 2024, the journal and its entire back catalogue will be published by the Open Library of Humanities using our in-house publishing platform Janeway. Thanks to the OLH’s diamond open access model (funded by an international network of more than 340 supporting libraries), Zygon is now free to read and does not charge authors publication fees. 

Zygon’s Editor Prof. Arthur C. Petersen (University College London) commented: “I have been actively pursuing ways to flip the journal to open access since 2020, guided by Zygon’s Board. I always found that diamond open access would be the ideal model to keep it possible for everyone to publish in our journal, but despite owning the journal’s title and contents copyright and having a sizeable endowment we just couldn’t afford to cover all costs. And then we were pointed in the direction of OLH in March 2022, initiated discussions with them and were happy to be selected for the flip, which was agreed by the Board in June 2022. It is so good to see that all the content from 1966 onwards is now freely accessible for anyone anywhere, forever!” 

There are alternatives to the commercialisation of scholarly publishing and at OLH we have been flipping subscription journals to non-for-profit diamond open access since 2015. Zygon is just the first of a series of journals that we will be flipping in 2024. Watch this space for more.

OLH Executive Director Dr Caroline Edwards said of the launch: “We’re so pleased to be welcoming Zygon to the Open Library of Humanities. As its name indicates, Zygon yokes together two entities or processes – religious studies and scientific perspectives. In an increasingly polarised and unstable world, this kind of intellectual generosity and curiosity is essential. We need to be able to discuss and dissect human value systems without rejecting empirical evidence or ignoring the important contributions that religious expression can offer. 

“We’ve made the entire archive of Zygon’s publishing history over almost 60 years available to read to anyone with an internet connection. This is the power of diamond open access, which helps scholarly research find a wider global readership.”

About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 30 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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