Open Library of Humanities
Background
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an open-access journal publisher based at Birkbeck, University of London. It was started in 2013 by two early career researchers, Caroline Edwards and Martin Paul Eve, who wanted to build a scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing enterprise. They were concerned that commercially-driven open access pushed the costs of publishing onto authors in a pay-to-publish model, which exacerbated an already unfair and inequitable publishing system. So they designed a publisher that would make humanities journals free for people to read as well as free for authors to publish in. Now, OLH publishes 33 journals in the humanities, across disciplines including philosophy, literature, linguistics, theology, cultural theory, media studies, architecture, and sociology. It is growing steadily, funded through a membership model with 340+ libraries worldwide paying an annual fee to support publications that anyone can access for free.
Mission
The aim of OLH is to liberate journals and their research communities from commercial ownership. It strives to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, as well as rigorously preserved for the digital future. OLH publishes diamond open-access journals, develops open-source software, and researches new avenues for scholarly communication.
Community Over Commercialization
“It’s completely immoral that commercial companies are taking academic content and selling it back to us. They have been enjoying profit margins greater than Coca-Cola and the oil companies for years. The entire university system suffers as a result. From the students whose scholarship programmes are axed, to the librarians who can’t afford to stock the books we write and teach, to the lecturers precariously employed on zero hours contracts, and the buildings we can’t afford to maintain properly. You can see how money has been extracted from higher education on an industrial scale to generate surplus value for publishers’ shareholders. That is not OK. It's a very simple logic for me. Publicly-funded university research should not be commodified and building a not-for-profit open-access publisher is one thing we can actually do about it.”
“Academics enter the profession because they are passionate about their subjects, it's a vocation. You’re in the classroom inspiring people to change their lives and put these ideas into practice. Yet, we’ve spent decades signing away our rights to our own research publications. We have no control over how that research is disseminated and then sold on in these subscription packages. With AI, the situation gets even worse as commercial publishers sell our data to big tech to power their large language models (LLMs). For me, ‘community’ is resisting all of that. What’s been done to the academic research process since universities started outsourcing publishing activities is reprehensible. It makes me absolutely furious, and that’s what motivates me. Community means fighting that.”
“At the Open Library of Humanities, we’re working with a new generation of digital university presses that are returning academic publishing to the academy. We’re placing community, equity, and not-for-profit principles unequivocally at the center of our practice. We’re proud to be part of the Open Institutional Publishers Association, a UK-based organization that launched in September 2023 and brings together 15 university-based publishers who are championing diamond open access. That’s our community. We are stronger together—everybody understands that, and everybody is working together. It’s a really exciting time to be involved in open access.”
“There’s been a sea change in open access policy mandates. Funders are starting to stipulate that they will only invest in not-for-profit and university-owned infrastructure. That’s a game changer, if they make good on their word. There is a vibrant community of diamond, university-based publishers that are ready to scale up and challenge the larger, commercially-provided platforms. But we need money to grow. The change in direction being communicated by funders and policymakers working at national and international levels gives me hope. As does the liveliness, creativity, and commitment of the community.”
- Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities