OLH Funding
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), which I co-direct with my Birkbeck colleague Dr Martin Paul Eve, has been awarded a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch its open access platform in September 2015. The 3-year award for $741,000 has been made to Birkbeck, University of London and will support the OLH as it builds its innovative financial model (the Library Partnership Subsidy, or LPS) to provide sustainable open access publishing without any author-facing charges via a system of consortial library support. This grant follows on from an Initial Planning Grant of $90,000 which was made to the University of Lincoln in 2014.
Since the LPS scheme opened in January 2015, the OLH has received financial support from more than 85 libraries around the world – and has exclusive partnerships with the library consortium LYRASIS in the United States and the digital content procurement organisation JISC Collections in the UK.
My role as Editorial Director over the next 3 years will be to recruit authors, editors and journals – building journal articles submissions as well as overseeing the migration of scholarly journals onto the platform – and continuing international advocacy for the OLH.
Read the Birkbeck press release here for further information about this grant.
Image by Pekka Nikrus under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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