Frequently asked questions.
These FAQs are intended for our core user groups – librarians, journal editors, and authors.
Openness and transparency are core to our activities. Ask us anything about our model and how we work. And you may even find your question answered here!
FAQ for libraries & consortia.
What makes the OLH unique among open-access publishers?
The OLH was one of the first not-for-profit publishers to fund humanities journals publishing their research diamond open access. Our library membership network means that university and public libraries financially support open-access publishing without transferring the costs onto authors or readers. This model of collective funding has been influential, leading to a number of other publishers adopting similar schemes.
As an innovator in this space, the OLH remains one of the best-known and most prestigious open-access publishers. Many of the journals that we publish have award-winning articles in their back catalogues. Other articles published in our journals have received international press coverage. We have also received awards for best practice in open-access publishing standards.
We are also well known for innovation in publishing technologies and community-supported infrastructure. Our publishing platform, Janeway, is used by hundreds of academic journals, libraries, and university presses worldwide under an open-source copyleft license. When you join the OLH, you are supporting a vibrant international community of scholars, librarians, publishing technology engineers, and like-minded open-access publishers.
What is the relationship between the OLH and Janeway?
Janeway was developed by the OLH as our in-house, not-for-profit publishing platform. It is strictly open source and shared under a copyleft license, which prevents against commercial acquisition of any part of the code base. The OLH tech team run and maintain Janeway, which powers all of the OLH's journals as well as being used by a growing number of of academic journals, scholarly societies, and university presses.
What are the benefits of library membership and what do members
receive?
Members will have full access to all published content in OLH journals, which are widely indexed in library catalogues and also available to read online at the publisher's website for anyone with an internet connection. Academics at members' organisations are eligible to submit their research for publication at any OLH journal without incurring author fees.
Every member is given a seat on the OLH Library Members’ Network, which is represented by the elected OLH Library Board. The Board is responsible for overseeing the governance of the OLH and representing library members’ interests. Members receive a yearly report including financial and publishing data. Library members are listed on the OLH website and are entitled to display a supporter badge in recognition of their contribution to funding open access.
What are the gold, silver and bronze pricing tires and do they
grant access privileges?
There is no special benefit to higher-tier membership in terms of exclusive access. Our mission at the OLH is to transition towards sustainable not-for-profit open-access publishing, so that libraries can move away from unaffordable commercial publishing costs (including journal subscriptions, bundles of titles, transformative agreements, and Article Processing Charges).
Over time, librarians will see savings on these costs as more journals flip towards diamond open access. By supporting the OLH at a higher tier, libraries can accelerate this transition away from commercially-published open access and put more pressure on commercial publishers to adapt their business models.
What are the benefits of OLH consortium membership?
We welcome expressions of interest from consortia, societies, networks, and scholarly projects interested in joining the OLH as a bloc. Members joining in a consortial group gain a discount of: 5% if 10 libraries join; 10% if 20 libraries join; 15% if more than 30 libraries join.
For further information about our consortial offer, please email our Marketing Officer Paula Clemente Vega: paula.clementevega@bbk.ac.uk.
Why should my library join when anyone can publish with you for
free?
By joining the OLH, your library is helping fund a sustainable transition away from commercial open-access publishing towards community-owned and scholar-led publishing. Without this transition, libraries will remain beholden to unaffordable journal subscription costs or transformative agreements for their academics to publish open access. Our membership rates are banded according to institutional size and gross national income (GNI) per capita, which is a fair pricing structure that contributes towards the repatriation of financial resources from the Global North to the Global South.
As a not-for-profit publisher with our own in-house publishing platform, the OLH has dramatically reduced the cost of high-quality journal publishing online. It’s cheaper for your library to join the OLH and pay an annual membership, which funds the publication of 500 articles across 33 journals each year, than to pay a single Article Processing Charge (APC) to publish one article open access with a legacy publisher. (Typically, it costs a humanities researcher c.£2,500 / €2,894 / $3,067 for an APC to publish their journal article open access with a publisher whose profits derive from library subscriptions).
Can you provide me with usage data for a member institution?
We don't currently produce any institution specific statistics, as the OLH is a completely open-access publisher we have no paywalls or requirements for login that would allow us to accurately capture this information. More information is available regarding the context for this decision.
How are membership subsidy fees spent by the OLH?
The OLH employs staff for technical support, maintenance, and ongoing platform development of our Janeway in-house publishing platform, as well as editorial and marketing. Revenue is spent on these staff costs, as well as publishing costs such as indexing, archiving, typesetting, web and server hosting costs.
You can see the breakdown of our publishing costs on our Governance and Finances page.
I’d like to join the OLH but my library has a limited budget. Are
you able to offer flexible banding?
OLH memberships are banded according to FTE size and geographical location. We adjust fees by country using data from the World bank on gross national income (GNI) per capita. You can use our calculator to assess your membership fee.
If our flexible banding is still too expensive for your current budget, we also have a donations button where you can give an amount of your choosing. If you would like to discuss this further, please get in touch.
What resources do you offer to librarians in order to support their
open-access initiatives?
Check our Resources page, where you can find our collection of essays, interviews and blog posts. You can also access our collection of posters, infographics, and promotional materials.
FAQ for editors.
What makes the OLH different from other academic publishers?
The OLH was one of the first not-for-profit publishers to fund humanities journals publishing their research diamond open access. Our library membership network means that university and public libraries financially support open-access publishing without transferring the costs onto authors or readers. This model of collective funding has been influential, leading to a number of other publishers adopting similar schemes.
The OLH is one of the best-known and most prestigious open-access publishers. Many of the journals that we publish have award-winning articles in their back catalogues. Other articles published in our journals have received international press coverage. We have also received awards for best practice in open-access publishing standards.
Unlike other academic publishers, the OLH does not charge any fees for authors to submit their journal articles or for readers to access and read articles. We support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities by bringing journals back into community ownership and developing our own not-for-profit publishing software.
We believe that academic research should be supported by a publisher and publishing infrastructure that is academic-led, not-for-profit, and community-governed. We therefore built our own in-house software, Janeway, which is under active development and protected by a copyleft license, safeguarding our independence from commercial acquisition. Janeway is developed in line with feedback from our editors to give them unprecedented control over their workflow.
My press wants to move to Open Access. Can the OLH help?
The OLH is a publisher in its own right. We do not fund the costs of journal publishing at other presses. However, our publishing platform, Janeway, can provide journal hosting at press level. You can read more about Janeway or contact Andy Byers from the Janeway team for further information.
Can the OLH publish my existing journal?
As part of our programme of growing our journals portfolio, the OLH considers applications from journals looking to move to diamond open access on an ongoing basis.
We accept applications from journal editors for titles that are: published via subscription models and looking to move to open access; already open access but with an excellent track record of research that is highly valued by its scholarly community; published by scholarly associations looking to make their journals open access.
See full information on the criteria and how to apply.
I want to set up a new open-access journal. Can the OLH help?
We don’t accept applications to set up new journals, as we receive many more applications than we are able to support. However, please see our resources page for more help on open-access publishing. You may be interested in using our in-house developed publishing platform, Janeway, and the hosting services we can provide even if the OLH is not your publisher. You can read more about Janeway or contact Andy Byers from the Janeway team for further information.
How would the OLH support my journal?
If your application is successful, we offer comprehensive support in the day-to-day running of your journal at the OLH. We have a small, friendly team of academic editors with humanities doctorates who understand the needs of editors and authors and are on hand to help – via email, video call, and instant messaging. You also have direct access to our tech developers who can be contacted for support via instant messaging.
Our editorial team will help you ensure that your journal meets the highest standards in scholarly publishing, as outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). This includes full transparency about the peer review processes, editorial structure, and community governance of your journal.
We offer comprehensive indexing and archiving, with a strong focus on the discoverability of your journal’s articles in university library catalogues. All OLH journal content is registered with Crossref and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Our journal information is harvested by Google Scholar and metadata is available for harvesting via OAI-PMH. Journals are registered at Cornell University, which maintains interoperability standards through metadata exchange among repositories. We also deposit articles in the CLOCKSS and LOCKSS permanent archiving systems at Stanford University, which are world leaders in high-confidence, resilient, secure digital preservation.
Where can I get help using the Janeway platform for my journal?
See the Janeway help pages for more information on how to use the platform.
FAQ for readers & authors.
Why should I publish Open Access?
You may be considering open access because your research is important to readers beyond the academy, who do not have access to university library subscriptions. Or perhaps because you’ve noticed that the numbers of article downloads and citations are significantly higher for open-access articles than for articles locked behind a paywall.
Alternatively, your librarian might have made you aware that your university's library budget is unable to keep pace with the prices set by commercial publishers. Perhaps, you are uncomfortable with treating scholarship like a product, with commercial publishers earning huge profits (often with bigger margins than Google and Coca-Cola) by selling scholars’ work back to universities through extortionate library subscriptions.
To find out more about the ‘serials crisis’ and the need for open-access models that support humanities work, see our timeline of the Open Access Movement.
Why should I publish open access with the Open Library of
Humanities?
Open Access publishers often charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) in place of the subscription fees that traditionally fall to institutional libraries. These APC fees are typically c. £2,500 / €2,894 / $3,067. Humanities disciplines receive substantially less funding than research in STEM and the social sciences. APC fees to fund the open-access publication of journal articles is unaffordable for many humanities scholars.
Unlike many open-access publishers, the OLH does not charge author fees (we are “diamond” open access). Instead, we work with our international network of university and public library partners to make open-access humanities publishing viable and equitable. Our collectively funded business model avoids the need for APCs.
While reshaping academic publishing to be more fair, inclusive, accessible, and equitable, we have also gained a reputation for publishing humanities research of the highest quality. The OLH has received several awards for our innovations in digital publishing and many articles in our journals have received awards and prizes from their scholarly communities. Our articles benefit from preserving the best traditions of scholarly practice such as rigorous peer review, whilst taking advantage of the latest developments in digital journal publishing – with high-quality presentation, robust digital preservation, strong discoverability and easy-to-share social media buttons.
How much does it cost for me to submit my article?
Nothing! Authors can submit their work to any of our journals at no cost, and should it pass the journal’s peer-review process and proceed to publication, there are no mandatory publication fees for any of our journals, ensuring that all our articles remain free-to-publish and free-to-read.
A few of our journals may request a Voluntary Author Contribution if an author’s academic budget permits, which in turn goes towards funding the OLH’s publication costs for the wider good of the open-access community, but such contributions are entirely voluntary and author waivers are given where this is not possible.
Does it cost readers to access my article?
No! There are no charges for readers to access, download and read our articles. All are proudly published as open access and are available to read worldwide with no charges.
Do I still have ownership of my work when I publish Open Access?
Yes – all copyright for research articles and other open access published work on OLH journals rests with the author(s). OLH journals by default use the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license to publish articles which permits the open access sharing of work; however, the author of the original work must always be credited. Your article can be linked to, hosted or displayed on other websites, but you will retain the copyright of your article’s text and in such instances, you must be credited.
Will my article be peer-reviewed?
Yes. All our journals are peer-reviewed, and we ensure the highest standards of publication ethics. Most of our journals are double-anonymous reviewed, but some experiment with innovative models of review, such as open review. The mode of review will be stated clearly on the journal submission page.
How can I submit my work to one of your journals?
To submit your article to one of our journals, see the full list of OLH-funded journals and click through to the website for your chosen journal. Full information will be given on how to submit on your chosen journal’s website.
I’m having technical issues with making my submission. Help!
First, check the Janeway submission help pages, to ensure you’re following the correct steps. If you’re still having problems, use our contact form to get in touch and one of the team will help.
I am interested in the OLH project. How can I participate?
To participate, you can submit an article to one of our journals, propose a special collection for our flagship Open Library of Humanities journal, or encourage your library to support our financial model.
One of the best ways to participate is to make sure that faculty are aware that they can publish with us, without any charges, across our range of journals. To help increase awareness, encourage your colleagues to place OLH articles on reading lists and use our peer-reviewed material in their teaching practice.