OLH welcomes the University of the Arts London (UAL) as a Bronze super-supporter

We are delighted to announce that the University of the Arts London (UAL) has joined us as a new Bronze super-supporter. UAL is a renowned public collegiate university in London, UK, specialising in arts, design, fashion, and the performing arts. Established as The London Institute in 1986, it became a university in 2003 and adopted its current name in 2004. The university comprises six distinctive colleges: Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, London College of Communication, London College of Fashion, and Wimbledon College of Arts, each with its own unique culture and focus. UAL is home to one of the largest international student communities in the UK and has helped launch the careers of many leading figures in the creative industries, including over half of all Turner Prize nominees.

Institutions worldwide now have the opportunity to voluntarily support OLH at a higher level—Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum—enabling us to expand our portfolio of open access journals and make even more world-leading scholarship freely available to all. There is growing momentum around journal flipping, but this requires increased financial support from libraries. By keeping our basic membership rates low, we help libraries manage costs. However, some institutions choose to contribute at a higher level to support diamond open access and help convert more humanities journals to this equitable model. Thanks to this additional support, we’ve been able to grow our portfolio of leading humanities journals at an unprecedented rate. Over the past year, OLH has welcomed eleven journals, including high-profile flips from commercial publishers such as Wiley and Springer Nature.

The Open Library of Humanities is collectively funded by its member libraries and could not operate without their generous support. Redirecting funds to support scholar-led diamond OA initiatives is vital for the survival of not-for-profit platforms such as OLH. This support helps build an academic publishing ecosystem based on equity and a vision of academic research as a global public good.

About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 34 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.