Open Library of Humanities


The Open Library of Humanities is a nonprofit, open-access publisher for the humanities and social sciences led by Martin Paul Eve and Caroline Edwards. It is also a megajournal, which was initially modelled on the Public Library of Science, but is not affiliated with it.

History

The Open Library of Humanities is being funded by core grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and will also use a library partnership subsidy model to cover costs. It has a number of advisory committees, such as the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee which includes PLOS co-founder Michael Eisen, Quebec-based academic Jean-Claude Guédon, and the Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, Kathleen Fitzpatrick. There is an Internationalisation committee to develop an international strategy. 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.
Although originally intended to run on Open Journal Systems, in 2017 OLH started development of a new platform, Janeway. Currently the main press site and the journal Orbit are hosted on the new platform. 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. In November 2013 it was announced that the Public Knowledge Project will be funding the development of the typesetter, known as meTypeset.
The Open Library of Humanities publishing model relies on support from an international collection of libraries, which in effect allows the publication of articles without the need for article processing charges.
The project was officially launched on 28 September 2015.