Open Access Update: JMU Joins the Open Library of Humanities

Posted on: January 11, 2023

We are proud to announce that JMU has taken another step in supporting open access publishing by joining the Library Partnership Subsidy system of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). The OLH is an award-winning, academic-led, open-access publisher of 28 journals that does not charge authors or readers. Instead, OLH covers its costs by payments from members of the international library consortium that JMU has joined. This funding promotes equitable, open access to research in the humanities.

“It is great to be able to invest in a community-led scholarly enterprise that eliminates the author-pays model of open access, which broadens participation in the creation and readership of research,”  says Yasmeen Shorish, JMU Libraries’ Directory of Scholarly Communications Strategies. “Supporting OLH aligns with our sustainable scholarship commitment to engage with information vendors that emphasize open access, transparency in pricing, and financially viable business models. This innovative approach to humanities scholarship support is critical to sustainable engagement.”

“We’re delighted to have the support of James Madison University,” said Paula Clemente Vega of the Open Library of Humanities. “OLH is funded by a consortial funding model in which institutions pool their resources in order to facilitate diamond open access in the humanities. It is thanks to this kind of institutional support that we can continue to expand our economically-effective OA model and ensure that nobody is charged for reading or publishing in our journals. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all our member institutions for making this vital work possible.”

The 28 journals published by the OLH include titles such as Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, Laboratory Phonology, and Studies in the Maternal. You can find articles from all OLH journals in JMU’s Library Search, which has indexed the full text of every OLH article. 

Questions about finding articles? Please contact your department’s liaison librarian. 
Questions about open access or publication fees? Please contact Yasmeen Shorish, Director of Scholarly Communications Strategies.

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