Over 340 university and public libraries worldwide already support us, which makes our platform safe and sustainable. As this support grows, we expand our portfolio of humanities journals by “flipping” subscription titles. This provides a route to diamond open access that is affordable and sustainable.
We also invest in building open-source publishing technologies that benefit the entire academic community. Investing in our own publishing platform means we can offer cutting-edge technology to our journals at a sustainable cost for our international library partners. It also safeguards the OLH against acquisition, ensuring our ongoing independence from commercial publishers.
The OLH has grown from 7 journals in 2015 to 33 journals in 2024
Our journal sites were viewed 2.5 million times in 2022
OLH publishes around 500 open access scholarly articles per year
We now have more than 340 supporting institutions
The OLH model has been built around the specific needs of humanities scholars. It works because we are embedded in the academic communities that we serve. Our model harnesses support from libraries and funders to protect niche fields and preserve research cultures that are at risk from austerity cuts to humanities research funding.
It is also grounded in an understanding that humanities disciplines face specific challenges. They are often poorly funded and less likely to benefit from research investment than the sciences. Postgraduates, independent scholars, less “research-intensive” institutions, and academics in the Global South are also disproportionately disadvantaged by an “author pays” system of open-access publishing.
Our model has been influential in the shift towards community-governed, not-for-profit open-access publishing because it addressed these issues. And it continues to work because we are aligned with the mission of libraries. Despite competitive market forces, we work in partnership with our library network to maximise societal access to research in the broadest sense.