News

American Historical Society Article on OLH

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-04-02

Jennifer Reut has published a short article about the launch of the OLH on the American Historical Association's website, under the "Perspectives on History" series. Outlining the OLH's development as an initiative designed to explore the suitability of a Public Library of Science model of publishing within the humanities and social sciences, Reut discusses the OLH's ambition to waive [...]

OA Publishing in Religion and Theology

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-04-02

Gary F. Daught who runs the Omega Alpha website on open access publishing in religion and theology has published an extensive interview with two of the OLH's committee members – Peter Webster (British Library) from the Academic Steering and Advocacy Committee and Justin Meggitt (Cambridge) from the Advocacy Forum. As Daught writes, academics within theology and religious studies are [...]

Martin Eve on Open Access in The Guardian

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-03-26

OLH Project Director Dr Martin Paul Eve published a comment piece on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 25th March 2013, which argues that academics in the humanities need to adopt "an activist approach" to the changing technological parameters of scholarly publishing. He writes: these projects represent utopian spaces in which academics can re-seize some limited agency, to [...]

OLH Launches Internationalisation Committee

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-03-26

We're delighted to announce the recent launch of the OLH's Internationalisation Committee. The Committee will advise on matters relating to the international reach of the OLH, including the incorporation of non-English language journals, editing processes and building sustainable partnerships with scholarly networks beyond Europe and the United States. For more information, please visit [...]

OLH Committee Minutes Now Available

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-03-26

You can now follow the discussions of each of the OLH's autonomous committees by downloading our ratified records of each debate – available on our Committee Minutes page. We'll be using this page to upload all forthcoming discussions. Each set of minutes is focussed around 2 or 3 specific questions relating to the possible infrastructural, editing and publishing models the OLH [...]

OLH featured in Times Higher Education Cover Story

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-02-15

This week the debate over "gold" open access in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) was given further attention in the Times Higher Education's cover story. The article featured interview material with OLH Academic Project Directors Dr Martin Paul Eve and Dr Caroline Edwards, as well as an inset feature on the Open Library of Humanities. As Paul Jump writes: Modelled on the [...]

A New Breed of Open Access Publisher

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-02-12

We're honoured that in his Guardian article, "PeerJ leads a high-quality, low-cost new breed of open-access publisher" (12th February), Mike Taylor cites the Open Library of Humanities as one of three new Open Access publishers (with PeerJ and eLife) who are radically changing the landscape of academic publishing. Mike, who is a member of our Advocacy Forum, writes that: All three [...]

OLH article on the Chronicle of Higher Education

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-02-01

We're delighted that the OLH has been receiving a widespread level of attention within the first week of the launch of our new website. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article on the project, which featured as their top news story of the day. As Jennifer Howard writes: Open access isn't just for scientists. Opening up research is an idea that appeals to more and [...]

Martin Eve writes for the LSE Impact Blog

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-02-01

This week, the influential LSE Impact Blog published Martin Eve's article on future directions in academic publishing and the OLH. As Martin writes, whilst the "serials crisis" facing academic publishing (in which university library budgets are unable to keep pace with the costs of purchasing journal subscriptions) has been building since 1986, the recommendations made more recently by [...]

Open Access Monographs Conference

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-01-25

OLH Founding Members Dr Martin Paul Eve and Dr Caroline Edwards have been invited as speakers at the first conference to address the issue of open access monographs in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). The conference is being co-organised by JISC Collections and the OAPEN Foundation on 1-2 July 2013 at the British Library in London. It will involve all stakeholders in scholarly [...]

Mike Taylor in The Guardian

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-01-18

For those who missed it, Mike Taylor, a member of our Advocacy Forum, has a piece in The Guardian that's been making waves. In it, Mike provocatively writes: Our job is to make knowledge. If we make it, then brick it up behind a wall, we're wasting our time and our funders' money – which ultimately means we're squandering the world's wealth. Publishing behind paywalls is [...]

Launching the Project

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-01-18

Since the initial call to arms, we've had well over 100 responses and the academic committees continue to grow. We're proud to announce that the project has a name! We are called the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) and our domain is openlibhums.org. We have a presence on Twitter as @openlibhums and we also have a Facebook page. The next steps that were taking [...]

The Future of Publishing

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-01-14

What does the future of academic publishing look like? What would it look like were we not entrenched in the historically contingent accident that has moulded the current system as it stands? Part of the OLH project is to think critically and imaginatively about what we could have and what we actually need without the constraints of the pre-existing model. Although neither affiliated [...]

Building a Library for the Future

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-01-14

Since 1986, subscription costs for academic journals have risen by 300% above inflation. In addition to exponentially increased research output over this period this has triggered what is known as “the serials crisis”; the inability of library budgets to keep pace with the prices set by publishers. Simultaneously, it has been realised that putting research behind paywalls is both unjust [...]

Unlocking Access to Scholarly Research

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 2013-01-14

Research that is funded by universities and other public bodies, or those committed to the production of knowledge and the advancement of society, should be available to read. There is currently, however, a massive inequality between groups who have access to this research. We propose that research in the humanities should be open and free to read and re-use, provided that authors are [...]