Winners of the OLH Open Access Award 2025 announced
Posted by Dr Paula Clemente Vega on 18 September 2025
Earlier this year, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) launched the fourth OLH Open Access Award 2025, an initiative dedicated to advancing open access in the humanities and to knowledge worldwide. We are pleased to announce that this year’s awards have been granted to three outstanding individuals and organisations in recognition of their exceptional commitment to open access. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who applied. Details of the winning projects are shared below.
Free to Publish, Free to Read: Diamond Open Access Workshops in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Singapore
Funding from the Open Library of Humanities will support a series of workshops in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Singapore focused on diamond open access publishing in the humanities. These workshops will raise awareness of open access—particularly the diamond OA model—and offer practical training on launching or transitioning a humanities journal to an open-source publishing platform. By focussing on diamond OA, the project aims to empower early-career researchers, students, and librarians with the knowledge that scholarly publishing can be community-led and free of cost for all participants, helping to address systemic inequities in access to knowledge. Each workshop will be hosted in collaboration with a local university or library and will be live streamed to enable broader participation.
Dr. Haroon Bakari, Assistant Professor at the University of Southampton Malaysia said of the award: "I am deeply honored to receive the OLH OA Award 2025. This recognition strengthens my commitment to advancing open access education across Malaysia, Singapore and Pakistan, and I look forward to contributing further to the mission of making knowledge freely accessible for all."
Open Philosophy
The project Open Philosophy aims to inform about, promote, and encourage open access in academic philosophy. The field is experiencing a growing number of open access journals hosted by university libraries, independent scholars, and organisations such as the Open Library of Humanities. Notable developments include the rise of top-ranking journals like Philosophers' Imprint and the creation of new venues such as Free & Equal and Political Philosophy, launched by the former editorial boards of two of the most prestigious social philosophy journals, now running open access with the OLH. For these journals to thrive, they require increased recognition within academia through greater awareness, support from scholars who see open access as a public good, and high-quality submissions that boost their credibility and impact.
Funding from the Open Library of Humanities will enable Open Philosophy to support the open access philosophy community through a sustained initiative to build a collaborative network. Planned activities include the development of a homepage listing open access philosophy journals, a search engine dedicated to these journals, a series of podcast interviews, a blog, and an annual “Open Philosophy Prize.”
Dr. Adrian Kind, Postdoctoral Researcher at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin commented: "It is a great pleasure for me to start the project! With more and more editorial teams making the effort to provide open access journals for us to publish in, philosophy as a discipline is becoming more community-driven and freeing itself from barriers to open knowledge exchange. The small contribution I hope to make is to make the efforts of journals more visible and to motivate more of us to look at and potentially reference the work in these journals, as well as submit our best work to them."
Data as a Story: A Humanities Dataset Exhibition
The award from the Open Library of Humanities will support an exhibition at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) aimed at raising awareness of humanities research data and the importance of making it openly available. The exhibition will showcase the diverse research at LJMU, promoting engagement and inclusive scholarship by presenting work in diverse formats for different audiences. It will highlight a broader range of scholarly contributions, including data creation, curation, and reuse, to foster a more collaborative research culture. Open humanities datasets from the LJMU repository will be featured, and researchers and postgraduates will be invited to participate. An accompanying arts-based open research guide, tailored to the arts and humanities, will offer resources and links to featured datasets. This project directly supports OLH’s mission by increasing the visibility and understanding of open research in the humanities and encouraging adoption of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data practices throughout the research lifecycle.
Amie Longthorne, Open Research Data Specialist at Liverpool John Moores said: "I’m delighted to receive this award from the Open Library of Humanities. It offers an exciting opportunity to explore new, creative ways of exhibiting research data — not just as outputs, but as stories that can engage and inspire. ‘Data as a Story’ makes research data more visible, accessible and engaging whilst celebrating the richness and diversity of humanities research at LJMU."
About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led publisher of 34 diamond open access 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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