Open Library of Humanities

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Open Library of Humanities
Open Library of Humanities logo.jpg
Parent company Birkbeck, University of London
StatusNonprofit
Founded2015
Founders Martin Paul Eve, Caroline Edwards
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Headquarters location London, England
Publication typesAcademic journals
Nonfiction topicsHumanities
Official website openlibhums.org

The Open Library of Humanities is a nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the humanities and social sciences [1] founded by Martin Paul Eve and Caroline Edwards. [2] Founded in 2015, OLH publishes 27 scholarly journals as of 2022, [3] including a mega journal, also called Open Library of Humanities, which was modeled on PLOS but not affiliated with it. [4]

Contents

History

The Open Library of Humanities was officially launched on 28 September 2015. [5] The project was funded by core grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [6] [7] and uses a library partnership subsidy model to cover costs. [8] It has a number of advisory committees, such as the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee which includes PLOS co-founder Michael Eisen, [1] Quebec-based academic Jean-Claude Guédon, and the Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, Kathleen Fitzpatrick. [9] An internationalization committee was formed in 2013 to develop an international strategy. [10] A member of this committee, Francisco Osorio, has written that the open access model of the Open Library of Humanities may be beneficial for researchers publishing in languages other than English. [11]

Although originally intended to run on Open Journal Systems, [12] in 2017 OLH started development of a new platform, Janeway. [13] Initially the main press site and the journal Orbit [14] were hosted on the new platform. In of March 2022 the project to migrate the remaining jouranls was completed. [15] The University of Lincoln, in partnership with the Public Knowledge Project, offered a funded place for an MSc by Research in Computer Science to develop an open-source XML typesetting tool as proposed by the Open Library of Humanities technical roadmap. [16] In November 2013 it was announced that the Public Knowledge Project will be funding the development of the typesetter, known as meTypeset. [17]

The Open Library of Humanities publishing model relies on support from an international group of libraries, which enables the publication of articles without the need for article processing charges. [18] In 2021, OLH became part of Birkbeck, University of London, maintaining its nonprofit status while reducing overhead. [19]

Journals

Related Research Articles

The Perseus Digital Library, formerly known as the Perseus Project, is a free-access digital library founded by Gregory Crane in 1987 and hosted by the Department of Classical Studies of Tufts University. One of the pioneers of digital libraries, its self-proclaimed mission is to make the full record of humanity available to everyone. While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation. The current version, Perseus 4.0, is also known as the Perseus Hopper, and is mirrored by the University of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JSTOR</span> Distributor of ebooks and other digital media

JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Birkbeck, University of London</span> Public university in England

Birkbeck, University of London, is a research university located in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. Established in 1823 as the London Mechanics' Institute by its founder Sir George Birkbeck and its supporters- Jeremy Bentham, J. C. Hobhouse and Henry Brougham- Birkbeck is one of the few universities to specialise in evening higher education in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital humanities</span> Area of scholarly activity

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.

The University of Wales Press was founded in 1922 as a central service of the University of Wales. The press publishes academic journals and around seventy books a year in the English and Welsh languages on six general subjects: history, political philosophy and religious studies, welsh and Celtic studies, literary studies, European studies and medieval studies. The press has a backlist of over 3,500 titles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project Muse</span> Online database of journals and ebooks

Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from some 400 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

<i>PLOS One</i> Peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal

PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Claude Guédon</span> French academic

Jean-Claude Guédon is a Quebec-based academic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public Knowledge Project</span> Metadata reservation project for e-journals

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.

Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an open access digital archive for archaeological research outputs. It is located in The King's Manor, at the University of York. Originally intended to curate digital outputs from archaeological researchers based in the UK's Higher Education sector, the ADS also holds archive material created under the auspices of national and local government as well as in the commercial archaeology sector. The ADS carries out research, most of which focuses on resource discovery, cross-searching and interoperability with other relevant archives in the UK, Europe and the United States of America.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

An open-access monograph is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license. These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open access movement.

A mega journal is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE. This "very lucrative publishing model" was soon emulated by other publishers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Denmark</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Denmark

Open access to scholarly communication in Denmark has grown rapidly since the 1990s. As in other countries in general, open access publishing is less expensive than traditional, paper-based, pre-Internet publishing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of open access</span>

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Paul Eve</span> British academic and writer

Martin Paul Eve is a British academic, writer, computer programmer, and disability rights campaigner. He is the Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London, Principal R&D Developer at Crossref, and was Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University until 2022. He is known for his work on contemporary literary metafiction, computational approaches to the study of literature, and open-access policy. Together with Dr Caroline Edwards, he is co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl E. Ball</span> American educator and scholar (born 1948)

Cheryl Ball is an academic and scholar in rhetoric, composition, and publishing studies, and Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University. In the areas of scholarly and digital publishing, Ball is the executive director for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Editor-in-Chief for the Library Publishing Curriculum. Ball also serves as co-editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an open access, online journal dedicated to multimodal academic publishing, which she has edited since 2006. Ball's awards include Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Science Communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Service to the Field, and the Technology Innovator Award presented by the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (7Cs). Her book, The New Work of Composing was the winner of the 2012 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her contributions to academic research span the areas of digital publishing, new media scholarship, and multimodal writing pedagogy.

References

  1. 1 2 Howard, Jennifer (29 January 2013). "Project Aims to Bring PLOS-Style Openness to the Humanities". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  2. Adeline Koh, 'Mellon Funding for the Open Library of the Humanities', The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2014, http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/mellon-funding-for-the-open-library-of-the-humanities/56649 Archived 2015-12-16 at the Wayback Machine .
  3. "Journals". Open Library of Humanities. Retrieved 2022-06-15.
  4. "About". Open Library of Humanities. 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  5. "OLH Launches". Open Library of Humanities.
  6. "Funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation". Open Library of Humanities. 7 April 2014. Retrieved 7 April 2014.
  7. "Birkbeck awarded $741,000 grant for new humanities open-access model of publishing".
  8. "Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference Report". Jisc Collections and OAPEN. 2013. p. 10. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  9. "Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee". Open Library of Humanities. 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  10. Schwartz, Meredith (14 February 2013). "Open Library of Humanities Begins Infrastructure Phase". Library Journal. Archived from the original on 25 October 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  11. Osorio, Francisco (5 April 2013). "Open Library of Humanities: mega journals seeing from the south". Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Chile. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  12. "Roadmap for Technical Pilot". Open Library of Humanities. 15 May 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  13. "Introducing Janeway – the new open source publishing software from Birkbeck" . Retrieved 2018-02-22.
  14. "News - Orbit Migrates to Janeway". orbit.openlibhums.org. Retrieved 2018-02-22.
  15. "Migration of OLH journals to Janeway completed". orbit.openlibhums.org. Retrieved 2022-08-29.
  16. "Funding Opportunity in MSc Computer Science by Research". University of Lincoln. 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  17. "PKP supporting OLH development of in-house typesetter". Public Knowledge Project. 20 November 2013. Retrieved 21 November 2013.
  18. "Open Library of Humanities".
  19. "The Open Library of Humanities merges with Birkbeck". Birkbeck, University of London. 2021-05-01. Retrieved 2022-06-15.