A Call to Libraries: Redirect Funding, Rebuild Scholarly Publishing 

Two months ago, we launched our Robin Hood poster as a call to reimagine scholarly communication beyond commercial control. The campaign encourages libraries to redirect even a small proportion of their expenditure away from the big five commercial publishers and towards community-owned, diamond open access initiatives. At a time when major research funders including the Gates Foundation, Cancer Research UK and UKRI are reassessing their support for APCs and transformative agreements, that message feels timelier than ever. 

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At the Open Library of Humanities, we know diamond open access works because we have been building it for more than a decade. Founded in 2015 with just 99 supporting libraries and 7 journals, OLH now publishes 37 journals with the support of more than 340 libraries worldwide. In the past three years alone, we have welcomed 16 new journals—with more to be announced shortly—demonstrating that community-funded publishing is not only viable but growing. The full list of new journals that have moved to OLH since 2023 is included below. 

• Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture (migrated from University of Nebraska Press) 
• Political Philosophy (migrated from Wiley) 
• Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science (migrated from Wiley) 
• Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (migrated from Emerald) 
• [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies (migrated from Media Commons) 
• Syntactic Theory & Research (STAR) (migrated from Wiley) 
• Quaker Studies (migrated from the University of Liverpool Press) 
• Theory and Social Inquiry (migrated from Springer Nature) 
• Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs (migrated from Wiley) 
• The International Labour Review / La Revista Internacional del Trabajo / La Revue Internationale du Travail (migrated from Wiley) 
• European Journal of Psychoanalysis (independent; OLH funding prevents a return to a paywall) 
• Energy Humanities (field-defining new journal) 
• The Hythe Review (migrated from a subscription model at the87press) 
• Philosophical Logic (migrated from Springer Nature) 
• Natural Language Semantics (migrated from Springer Nature) 
• Medieval Sermon Studies (migrating from Taylor & Francis in January 2027) 

Many of these titles follow editorial resignations from prestigious journals published by commercial publishers. A full list of editorial resignations and more context can be accessed in the Open Access Directory’s Journal declarations of independence page. Not long ago, when we launched the Robin Hood poster, we also published an extensive blog post making the case that universities should redirect funds from costly commercial publishers and transformative agreements to community-owned diamond open access, framing scholarly publishing as a struggle to reclaim knowledge as a public good.  

In recent years, a growing number of universities have walked away from expensive big deals and transformative agreements. For many research-intensive UK universities, these packages consume around 40% of library acquisitions budgets, and in some cases as much as 60%. Meanwhile, some of these scholarly publishers report profit margins that are far higher than many of the world's largest companies. Companies such as Elsevier and Taylor & Francis often outperform firms such as Amazon, Google, and even Apple in terms of profitability. This imbalance is particularly striking at a time when the UK higher education sector is facing severe financial pressures, with more than 20,000 university job cuts over the past three years, and a further 10,000 jobs estimated to be at risk each year if the sector's financial crisis persists. It is difficult to justify spending millions on commercial publishing contracts while universities continue to make cuts to staff and teaching. 

On the more positive side, we are also encouraged to see that major research funders are beginning to question the long-term sustainability of APC-funded publishing and transformative agreements. The Gates Foundation, for instance, discontinued funding for APCs in January 2025 as part of its revised Open Access Policy, Cancer Research UK has recently announced it is withdrawing support for APCs, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has confirmed that it will stop providing funding for hybrid journals covered transformative agreements from the 2028–29 funding year. While their policies differ, they reflect a growing recognition that public research funding should be redirected away from expensive commercial publishing models towards more equitable and sustainable forms of open access.  

There is an alternative to these expensive TAs, big deals and APCs. If instead of spending large sums on the big five commercial publishers, universities invested this money into diamond OA or organisations such as the recently launched Open Journals Collective we would at least help build a fairer system of academic publishing while also creating a more affordable and sustainable future for library budgets. If OLH has succeeded in its mission to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities—for free, for everyone, for ever—it was precisely because of this kind of university support.  We rely on library donations not just for our survival but to continue expanding of our work. Without increased financial support from libraries, we would not be able to continue flipping subscription journals, rescuing high-profile titles at risk of commercialisation, and supporting journals threatened by austerity cuts in humanities research.  

We therefore call on universities to take the next step by redirecting even a small proportion of their expenditure away from expensive big deals, TAs and APCs and towards community-owned diamond open access. Every new library that joins OLH helps sustain existing journals, enables the transition of new titles away from commercial publishers, and contributes to a publishing ecosystem that is more equitable, more resilient, and more affordable. If universities are serious about the long-term sustainability of scholarly communication, supporting community-owned, non-for-profit infrastructure must become part of the solution. 

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