OLH partners with the UK's leading group of science museums
Posted by Professor Caroline Edwards on 24 July 2026
We’re delighted to announce that the Science Museum Group Journal will join OLH in Autumn 2026. This engaging publication is the official journal for the five national UK museums in the Science Museum Group – the Science Museum in London, the National Railway Museum in York, Locomotion in County Durham, the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, and the Science and Innovation Park in Wiltshire.
Released biannually, the Journal publishes the work of international scholars and practitioners working in the fields of curatorial practice, science communication, archival work, and innovative and creative approaches to science and its history, material culture, communication, display, and presentation in museums. It has a wide readership of academics and museum professionals, as well as members of professional bodies, societies and institutions.
The Journal also supports and disseminates research undertaken at the Science Museum Group, which coordinates the Science Museums and Archives Consortium. This consortium brings together the UK’s leading cultural institutions to sustain the historical study of science. Members include the Science Museum Group, the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), the Royal Society, the BT Group Archives, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Collaborating with universities, the consortium supports the next generation of researchers via AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral partnership studentships.
The Science Museum Group Journal was launched in 2015 and published by the Science Museum's Research and Public History Department until Summer 2026. Researchers who contribute to the Journal come from a range of academic disciplines and engage with the specific practices of the museum as well as more theoretical work on the themes of historical and contemporary science, technology, engineering and medicine.
As one peer reviewer commented: “The Science Museum Group Journal is unique in the UK museum journal landscape in that it focuses on science museums” and “is recognized as an important source of leading-edge research.” Another peer reviewer called the journal “unique in the world of historical and museological research.” They continued: “in an era of research and practice that is often afflicted by an extreme specialization that can prevent neighbouring disciplines from effectively intercommunicating, the Journal is a paradigmatic example of how the academic world, science heritage sector, and educational domain can all speak productively to each other.”
OLH’s Executive Director, Professor Caroline Edwards, said of the move: “The entire team is really thrilled to welcome the journal to OLH and we’re looking forward to working with the Science Museum Group’s experienced team of editors, researchers, and curators. This is the first journal we’ve partnered with in the museum sector and already we can see exciting possibilities for supporting the journal’s research publications, as well as processes, on our world-leading digital platform Janeway.”
Kate Steiner, Science Museum Group Journal Editor, commented: “The Journal has found a perfect new home with OLH, which will allow it to further flourish. As well as providing extended international reach through its links and indexing, OLH's Janeway platform makes the most of new digital opportunities. OLH also echoes the Science Museum Group’s value of being 'Open for All', producing scholarship and practice knowledge that is relevant and accessible to everyone. I'm delighted to be planning the Journal's next chapter with a team that shares our enthusiasm and values.”
With its transdisciplinary film and sound research, the Journal joins other multimedia journals at OLH including [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, Journal of Embodied Research, and Open Screens, the official journal of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.
The Journal is currently in the process of migrating to OLH in time for its next issue, which will be published in Autumn 2026. A new website for the Journal will be announced shortly.
About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led publisher of 39 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 OLH 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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Featured image by Tullio Dainese shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.