Quaker Studies joins the Open Library of Humanities

We are delighted to announce that Quaker Studies (QS) has fully transitioned to the Open Library of Humanities. Quaker Studies is the official journal of the international Quaker Studies Research Association (QSRA), which is the umbrella organisation for all those studying, teaching, researching or connected with research into one of the areas of Quaker studies. The journal is the only peer reviewed multi-disciplinary journal covering all aspects of Quaker Studies including, but not limited to, anthropology, art, cultural studies, digital humanities, history, literature, peace studies, philosophy, research methodology, sociology, theology, and women’s studies. QS launched in 1996 and is published twice yearly. In 2015 QS joined Liverpool University Press (LUP) and became diamond open access in 2018 thanks to funding provided by the Open Library of Humanities as part of a publishing partnership with LUP. 

As of 2024, the journal and all back content since 2008 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), Quaker Studies will continue to be free to read without charging authors publication fees. 

Dr Caroline Edwards, OLH Executive Director, said “We’ve been working with the brilliant editorial team at Quaker Studies since 2018 and are proud to be able to continue as their publisher. Moving the journal onto our open-source publishing platform means the journal’s editors and authors will benefit from our world-leading digital publishing technology. They join a global community of academics working together to make sustainable diamond open access a reality.”

Dr Rebecca Wynter, one of the Quaker Studies editors, commented: “We’ve been working with OLH for several years and are now delighted to move fully to Janeway. OLH’s ethos and platform enable the journal to continue supporting Quaker studies scholars and sharing their work globally with online readers, irrespective of author or reader's wealth or status. Together with QSRA we are meeting the dramatic shift in the academic landscape equipped for a digital future.” 

Quaker Studies is one of seven new journals joining the OLH in 2023-2024, which includes five other journals that are “flipping” away from subscription models: Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, Political Philosophy, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Thanks to the support of our international network of library members, the OLH has been able to undertake the complex, skilled technical work of migrating these journals and committing to fund the cost of their publication in perpetuity.

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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