OLH launches 7 new journals

The Open Library of Humanities has made substantial investments over the past few months, including hiring additional staff to improve our open-source platform, meet website accessibility standards, build our journals portfolio, and launch a new publisher website to clarify the work that the organisation does. You can read our Spring Newsletter to get an overview of our latest developments and updates.  

New OLH journals include:

•  Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture (who left the University of Nebraska Press)
• Political Philosophy (who left Wiley)
• Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science (who left Wiley)
• Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (RHETM) (who left Emerald Publishing)
• [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies (who left Media Commons)
• Syntactic Theory & Research (STAR) (who left Wiley)
• Quaker Studies (who left a Liverpool University Press publishing partnership with OLH to become solely published by OLH)

This increases the OLH’s portfolio to 30 journals currently publishing, with a further 3 high-profile journals who will be leaving their commercial publishers in Spring-Summer 2024 to relaunch at the OLH. Thanks to the support of the OLH’s 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. More information on these new journals can be found here.  

OLH library members have already reported that these journal flips from commercial publishers to our collectively-funded diamond OA model helps them make the business case for reducing their serials spend. If you would like any additional information to help your library pivot away from author-pays OA fees towards diamond OA with the OLH, please get in touch with our Executive Director, Dr Caroline Edwards (caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk).  

In October 2023, we launched our Zombie Journal campaign and poster during Open Access Week. This was designed as a playful way to raise awareness about the devaluation of intellectual integrity among commercial publishers that continue with “undead” journals after editorial boards have resigned. As momentum builds for journal “flipping,” there are a growing number of zombie journals that have lost the trust and respect of their academic communities. 

At the OLH we have shown that there are alternatives to the commercialisation of scholarly publishing; we have been flipping subscription journals to not-for-profit diamond open access since 2015. The OLH now publishes 30 leading humanities journals and has its own in-house publishing platform, Janeway, which is used by other publishers and university presses. OLH is no longer a small start-up – its diamond open access publishing model has set a precedent followed by other not-for-profit publishers and the OLH plays a leading role in international conversations about improving equity in open access. 

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all our member institutions for your continued support: from all of us at the OLH, thank you for continuing to make this vital work possible.   

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 model of collective funding enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, which charges neither 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 on our signup page.