What we do.
Everything we do at the OLH is designed to preserve access to humanities scholarship in the digital age.
Day-to-day, this means publishing articles in our journals, developing open-source software, researching new possibilities for scholarly communication, and engaging our community of librarians, editors, and researchers.
Publish.
Hosting 30 peer-reviewed academic journals (and counting!), including our flagship Open Library of Humanities Journal.
We oversee editorial processes and provide support to our editors to ensure the highest standards of research integrity. As our library supporters grow, we expand our portfolio by ‘flipping’ subscription journals to diamond open access.
Develop.
Building Janeway, a powerful, flexible, emphatically open-source publishing platform.
Having our own software makes OLH journals sustainable and gives us independence from commercial publishing platforms. We listen to our journal editors and continually improve the platform with scholars’ needs in mind.
Research.
Mobilising our affiliation with Birkbeck, University of London to ensure that OLH is truly scholar-led.
Our founders use their research time at Birkbeck to advance scholarship on open access and the politics of collective action. Co-founder Prof. Martin Paul Eve researches scholarly communications in books such as Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (2024) and Open Access and the Humanities (2014). Co-founder Dr Caroline Edwards has 15 years' experience publishing her research and building academic networks in the humanities, including setting up new journals and scholarly research associations, and working with editors to enshrine community ownership of journals.
This specialism extends to our wider organisation. Our team uses their doctorates in humanities subjects to steer robust and quality open-access research to publication. We also continue our scholar-led tradition through user experience (UX) research into what our users want, continually improving our software to put scholars in charge.
Engage.
Rallying our global community of librarians, editors, and academics around our shared vision of not-for-profit humanities publishing.
We deliver talks, participate in working groups and committees, write, lead, and collaborate to champion open access as an equitable and sustainable alternative to commercial publishing. We also present awards to recognise exemplary contributions to the OA community (and we’ve won a few of our own).
Journals
30
Articles published
11,025
Funding received
£2.5m
