Humanities scholars will now be able to benefit from a collaborative open access (OA) consortium agreement which means that authors will not have to pay to make their research open access. The publishing model – the first of its type in the UK – is being offered by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) following negotiations with Jisc.
Not-for-profit and scholar led, the Open Library of Humanities is a gold open access platform for a range of humanities journals. Publishing across a wide range of humanities disciplines, the model works by sharing the costs across its consortium of library members – who pay a fee to join – rather than charging authors and their institutions an upfront fee on publication (article processing charges).
OLH has already launched a similar approach in North America. Since the consortium was announced in January 2015 more than 60 libraries have signed up from all across the US, including the GALILEO consortium, which comprises over 2,000 institutions in the state of Georgia.
