University of Maryland Libraries – College Park join OLH LPS model

We are extremely pleased to announce that the University of Maryland Libraries – College Park have joined the Open Library of Humanities' Library Partnership Subsidy system. The University of Maryland is a public research university, the flagship campus of the University System of Maryland, and the original 1862 land-grant institution in the State. It is one of 62 members of the Association of American Universities, comprising the leading research universities in the United States and Canada.

The Open Library of Humanities is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee.

Professor Martin Paul Eve, a founder and academic project director of the OLH, welcomed the University of Maryland Libraries – College Park: “A recent statement by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities strongly supported academic journals flipping from subscription modes with for-profit publishers to an open access mode published by those with a mission to make work as widely available as possible and to keep costs down. As the Open Library of Humanities is the underlying support mechanism for that particular flip, we are delighted to have the support of the University of Maryland Libraries – College Park, part of the original land-grant institution in Maryland.”

Babak Hamidzadeh, Dean of University of Maryland Libraries, stated that: "Our support for the Open Library of Humanities is consistent with our overall support for open access. We seek to provide alternative publishing models that increase access to scholarship. Moreover, we seek to offer humanists a solution that makes sense for the ways in which they produce and disseminate their work."

Libraries outside the US and UK interested in joining the OLH Library Partnership Subsidy model should contact Professor Martin Paul Eve: martin.eve@openlibhums.org or Dr Caroline Edwards: caroline.edwards@openlibhums.org. UK-based libraries can join through Jisc Collections at http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/Overview/Index/2120. US-based libraries can join through LYRASIS at https://lyrasis.openlibhums.org.