Winners of the OLH Open Access Award 2024 announced
Posted by Dr Paula Clemente Vega on 10 September 2024
Earlier this year, the Open Library of Humanities announced the OLH Open Access Award 2024, a fund dedicated to promoting the benefits and impact of open access to humanities scholars and disciplines and to knowledge worldwide. This year, 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 and their projects are announced below:
Opening Access of Knowledge to All
Funding from the Open Library of Humanities Open Access Award will support two specialized workshops on open access publishing designed for humanities scholars based in India. Despite more than two decades of open access developments and initiatives, a concerning gap persists in understanding of open access publishing within Indian research communities. Misinformation proliferates within the academic sphere, obscuring the purpose of open access, particularly the diamond model. Exploiting this ambiguity, commercial publishers predominantly champion gold and hybrid open access, perpetuating a cycle that marginalises alternative models. To address this issue, more outreach is essential. India’s extensive educational network, including over 55,000 colleges, universities, and research institutions, presents a considerable challenge for effective dissemination of accurate information. These workshops will play a crucial role in raising awareness about the diamond open access model, educating researchers on the principles and benefits of open access, and fostering a culture of accessibility, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
Priya, Library Assistant at Parsar Bharti and Research Scholar at Central University of Himachal Pradesh commented: “We thank the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) for providing us with this award. This will help us to conduct awareness sessions of Open Access, and its different models among scholars of humanities. We will also discuss how humanities scholars can start their journals using open-source software. We aim to have all scientific sources in Diamond open access so that everyone has access to knowledge at the right time.”
Lancaster University Library
Lancaster University Library aims to facilitate a Research Culture in which Open Access Book publishing is part of normal, everyday practice, rather than a box ticking exercise. The library has previously focused on developing its infrastructure and workflows to make it possible and make it easy for authors to publish open access monographs. This includes developing the Trailblazers Early Career publishing initiative in collaboration with Liverpool University Press, the University of Liverpool and the University of Salford and its involvement as a partner in the Open Book Futures Project. In the coming 12 months, the library will focus on working closely with its research community to normalize open access book publishing. To achieve this, the library will use the funding provided from the OLH Open Access Award to organize a series of book launch events for Lancaster University authors who have published open access monographs. These events, conducted in partnership with the authors, will be open to the public and external researchers. Each event will feature a discussion of the authors' decision to publish open access, their experience of the process, and which model they used. These events will also be an opportunity to raise awareness on open access monograph publishing and Diamond Open Access.
Andrew Barker, Director of Library Services at Lancaster University Library said of the award: "We are extremely grateful to have received this Open Access Award from the Open Library of Humanities. The fund will allow us to celebrate the successes of our Lancaster authors who have published their books Open Access, whilst also raising the profile of OA book publishing amongst our wider academic community over the next 12 months."
International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS)
Sustainability and Beyond: Journal of the International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS) is a diamond open access, peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to publishing high-quality, field-shaping work on sustainability and development issues. The journal will be launched with funding from the Open Library of Humanities during the 31st ISDRS conference in June 2025. Supported by ISDRS's community, the journal will serve as a platform for scholarly and scientific work exploring the future of sustainability amidst global crises. It aims to foster diverse conversations and perspectives, benefiting junior scholars through themed special issues and standalone articles. The journal will also incorporate multimedia elements such as video clips, audio, images, and digital objects to enhance scholarly engagement. Funding from the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) will support its technical development. This includes the creation and management of essential website content, such as author instructions, submission guidelines, and editorial policies.
Dr Olga Cam, accounting lecturer at the University of Sheffield commented: “The award has been immensely valuable for ISDRS, enabling us to address crucial practical aspects of journal creation ahead of the planned launch of the Sustainability and Beyond journal at the 2025 ISDRS Conference in Budapest. We aim for this pioneering cross-disciplinary journal to amplify scholarly contributions, enhance the global discourse on sustainability, and provide vital support and opportunities for emerging researchers in the field.”
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.
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.