The Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library at Gustavus Adolphus College is excited to announce that, with the generous support of the Kendall Center for Engaged Learning, we are joining the Open Library of Humanities. The OLH is a UK-based non-profit publishing platform for high-quality journals (and, in time, books) in the humanities. All of the content published on the OLH platform is open access – free to anyone in the world with an internet connection to read without charge. And, because there’s not usually a lot of money available to researchers in the humanities, authors don’t pay any fees (a practice more common in open access science journals. In those cases, the Kendall Center can help with fees, too. We love the Kendall Center.)
Begun in 2013, and this year officially launched, the OLH is currently host to a new interdisciplinary mega-journal and several established journals that have made the move from closed subscription-based funding to open access. Content in the fields of classics, modern languages and cultures, philosophy, theology and history, to political theory, sociology, anthropology, film and new media studies, and digital humanities, goes through the same rigorous peer review as other established publications. The mission of the OLH sums it up well:
Our mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever.
Why do we need this new kind of publishing? Because humanities research matters – and too few people have access to it. By creating new publishing models that shift library expenditures toward publishing scholarship in a way that will benefit all, rather than paying corporations for limited and pricey subscriptions, we can build a more just and equitable way for everyone to have a chance to benefit from research that is currently only available to the few. We’re very happy to join other institutions around the world to support this innovative and principled venture.