We are the
Open Library
of Humanities.

For free.
For everyone.
For ever.

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning open-access publisher of internationally leading academic scholarship. Our mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever. Our goal is to liberate university research from commercial control. We believe that scholarship should be academic-led and community-owned.

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Our vision is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities by bringing journals back into community ownership and developing our own not-for-profit publishing software.

What we do.

Everything we do at the OLH is designed to preserve access to humanities scholarship in the digital age.

Day-to-day, this means publishing articles in our journals, developing open-source software, researching new possibilities for scholarly communication, and engaging our community of librarians, editors, and researchers.

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Librarians & supporters.

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Readers & authors.

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Editors.

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“Many publishers believe that radical openness is not sustainable. Yet the remarkable growth of the OLH over the last ten years demonstrates that it is, with the right ingenuity and commitment. The OLH is a model for what publishing should be.”

Prof. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University.
“In the past decade, the OLH has demonstrated the viability of a collective and solidarity-driven investment approach within research communities. This model offers a sustainable and scalable route towards achieving genuine Open Access in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.”

Prof. Leslie Chan, Associate Director, Centre for Critical Development Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough and original signatory of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001).
“Launching the OLH has been an extraordinary journey. We built a public good out of passion and rage and hope. We continue to build it collectively every day.”

Dr Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Birkbeck, University of London.

How we work.

Unlike many open-access publishers, we do not charge author fees. We have spent a decade building a sustainable business model for funding diamond open-access publishing. This would not be possible without the hard work of and support from academic and public libraries worldwide, who have joined us to fund publishing costs fairly.

We have also developed our own in-house publishing platform, which safeguards our independence from commercial publishers.

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