Winners of the OLH Open Access Award 2026 announced

Earlier this year, the Open Library of Humanities launched the fifth edition of its OLH Open Access award, an initiative dedicated to advancing open access in the humanities and expanding access to knowledge worldwide. We are pleased to announce that this year’s awards have been granted to six outstanding projects 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.
 
Opening African Humanities: A Uirtus Workshop on Diamond Open Access and Metadata Quality
 
This project, led by Uirtus: Journal of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lomé, Togo, will use funding from OLH for an online workshop and a freely accessible bilingual English and French mini toolkit on diamond OA advocacy and improving metadata quality for African humanities journals. Many African humanities journals publish high-quality research but face challenges in ensuring that their work is fully visible and discoverable internationally. In particular, incomplete or inconsistent metadata can limit the reach and impact of published research by making articles harder to find, index, and connect with global scholarly networks. The project will address these challenges by providing practical guidance on diamond OA, publishing ethics, article-level metadata, DOI management, ORCID, licensing, DOAJ readiness, and strategies for improving discoverability. The workshop and resources are aimed at journal editors, reviewers, authors, postgraduate students, and early-career researchers in Togo and Francophone Africa.
 
Professor Komla M. Avono, Scientific Director and Chief Editor of Uirtus (peer-reviewed journal of Arts and Humanities), University of Lomé, Togo said of the award: “This award is both an honor and a mandate. For Uirtus and the University of Lomé, it affirms that Francophone African humanities journals are not peripheral to the global scholarly conversation but indispensable to its intellectual richness. With OLH’s support, we will transform this recognition into shared capacity, equipping editors and emerging scholars across Togo and Francophone Africa with practical tools to make African knowledge more visible, discoverable, and freely accessible to the world.”
 
Life of the Buddha Project
 
Supported by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the Life of the Buddha (LOTB; www.lifeofthebuddha.org) is an interdisciplinary digital humanities project that presents a unique body of Buddhist literature in its original Tibetan language alongside new English translations. The texts are additionally linked to a related major mural program–over 135 square metres (1,450 square feet)–detailing the life of the Buddha. All the material is associated with a remote 17th-century monastery on the Tibetan plateau. This digital resource is used by a growing number of international universities and is the largest open-access multimedia archive of materials depicting the life of the Buddha from the Tibetan cultural world.
 
Project funds from the OLH open access award would allow the translation, proofreading, and editing of the final twenty-eight chapters of previously untranslated materials for publication on the project’s bilingual website. This work will be conducted by an advanced graduate student with native fluency in Tibetan. This direct creation of open access material furthers the project’s main goal of making primary-source Buddhist literature available in English, preserving this cultural heritage for a global audience via sustainable online access.
 
Karma Rigzin, Doctoral Student, Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia commented: "This award will help make an important body of Tibetan Buddhist literature freely accessible to readers worldwide, advancing both scholarship and the preservation of cultural heritage."  
 
Open Presidential Archives
 
Universidad Diego Portales requests support from the OLH Open Access Award to produce a short trilingual guide, in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, on the use of open presidential archives in humanities research and teaching. The guide will take the Archivo Presidente Ricardo Lagos, held by Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, as its main case, and will circulate through the Red Iberoamericana de Archivos Presidenciales, recently presented by Universidad Diego Portales, the Fundação Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the Fundación Felipe González.
 
The Archivo Presidente Ricardo Lagos contains over 200,000 documents related to the personal, academic, political, and presidential work of former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos. The archive is open to the public on-site and via digital access. In 2025, the archive received a Best Public Project award and was included in the National Register of UNESCO Chile’s Memory of the World Programme.
 
Alejandro Martínez, Director of General Education, Archives and Culture, Universidad Diego Portales said of the award: "We are honoured to receive this recognition from the Open Library of Humanities. Presidential archives are fundamental resources for understanding how public decisions are made and for expanding access to documentary sources that support research, teaching, and informed public debate. We hope this project will encourage wider use of these collections across the humanities and strengthen international collaboration around open archival access.”
 
Open Humanities Publishing, Australia
 
This award will fund a three-session mini workshop series titled "Open Humanities Publishing," designed to equip Higher Degree Researchers (HDRs) and early-career academic staff at Excelsia University College with the knowledge and practical tools to navigate open access publishing in the humanities. Each hybrid session will last approximately 90 minutes and will be delivered online via Zoom and in person on campus in Sydney over a 12-week period, with each session spaced 3–4 weeks apart to allow participants time to apply their learning.
 
The ultimate goal is to establish a special interest group that provides a supportive forum for discussion, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. The group would also serve as a platform to advocate for open access publishing and support participants as they progress throughout their research careers.
 
Dr Kathy Lee, English Language and Academic Skills Advisor, Excelsia University College commented: “We are delighted to receive this OLH Open Access Award, which will enable us to create a practical and supportive space for higher degree researchers and early-career academics to explore open publishing in the humanities. Through the workshop series and the special interest group it will establish, we hope to build confidence, foster collaboration, and help make open access publishing a more visible, viable, and sustainable pathway throughout researchers’ careers.”
 
Empowering Indian Scholarship
 
Funding from the OLH open access award will be used to organise two full-day in-person workshops at Indian universities located in North India. The workshops will help increase awareness of diamond OA as an equitable alternative to APC-funded publishing. The workshops are aimed at humanities faculty, journal editors, researchers, librarians, and institutional publishers, focusing on helping attendees with the practical implementation of the steps covered.
 
Workshops will cover the evolution of OA and community-owned scholarly publishing, research integrity, publication ethics, CC licensing, copyright, metadata, indexing, preservation, discoverability, DOAJ best practices, and a demonstration of Janeway. Funding is sought to cover travel to the workshops, printing of workshop handouts and quick reference guides, and the production of an openly licensed educational toolkit; no costs are required for venues or staff time.
 
Rupinder Singh, Assistant Librarian. Central University of Punjab commented: "I am honoured to receive the OLH Open Access Award 2026. The Open Library of Humanities has demonstrated that high-quality scholarly publishing can thrive without financial barriers for authors or readers. This award will enable us to promote Diamond Open Access and community-owned scholarly publishing among institutions in India through practical workshops and open educational resources. Inspired by the Open Library of Humanities' vision of equitable scholarly communication, I look forward to helping more universities and journal editors explore Janeway as a sustainable open-source publishing platform and strengthen open access for the benefit of the wider research community."
 
Chilean Network of Digital Humanities
 
Funding from OLH will be used to fund a one-day symposium on Open Scholarship in the Humanities to be held in Santiago de Chile in January 2027, hosted at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The application noted that Chile has a well-developed ecosystem of diamond OA humanities journals, but that conversations on how to make other forms of research output openly available have been largely absent from existing scholarly practices.
 
To redress this, the event aims to bring together postgraduate students, ECRs, librarians, and humanities journal editorial board members to cover topics including FAIR data principles, how and where to deposit humanities research data, scholarly outputs beyond research articles, and licensing guidelines for research data and software. Speakers will include specialists in research data management, open infrastructure, and digital humanities. The event will be live streamed and all materials published under a CC BY licence after the event, including a guide to depositing and licensing humanities research data that can be reused for teaching and editorial workflows.
 
Riva Quiroga, Research Fellow, OLS said of the award: “We are very excited to be organising a symposium on Open Scholarship in the Humanities. For our newly established Digital Humanities network, this is an important stepping stone. The symposium will bring conversations around openness into humanities fields where these practices are still emerging, while creating a space for people to connect and build community. We hope it will strengthen open scholarship practices in Chile and contribute to broader conversations about how humanities research can be shared, reused, and made more accessible.”

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