Open Library of Humanities

Demmy Verbeke is associate professor of open scholarship at the Faculty of Arts of KU Leuven. His research and teaching focus on information science and (the role of libraries in) scholarly communication and digital scholarship in the humanities. Demmy combines this appointment with the position of head of Artes, the unit of KU Leuven Libraries responsible for collections and services for the Arts and Humanities. As a member of the management team, he also contributes to the strategic development and operational management of KU Leuven Libraries as a whole.

Demmy is the architect of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA (see also ‘Library Funding for Open Access at KU Leuven’, with Laura Mesotten, DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.565, and numerous other publications). This fund is set up as a separate budget line within the financial structure of the library to be spent exclusively on investing in new and innovative publishing models and Open Research infrastructures, which avoid a costly for-profit business model and put scholars back in charge.

Statement of interest.

“I have been a supporter of the Open Library of Humanities since the beginning. As faculty librarian of the Faculty of Arts of KU Leuven, I campaigned for financial support from my university when OLH was still in the planning stage. As a result, we were the first Belgian institution to sign up and have been a sponsor ever since. What is more, we have followed the OLH’s example and expanded our support for non-profit and community-driven infrastructures for scholarly communication.”