St Andrews University joins Open Library of the Humanities

Last month the University of St Andrews joined the Open Library of the Humanities - an open access mega-journal and book publisher (see previous post on OLH here). Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a founder and director of OLH, welcomed St Andrews:

“It is wonderful that the University of St Andrews has joined the OLH LPS [Library Partnership Subsidy] programme. With the help of institutions like St Andrews, we can build a way for OA to work in the humanities that is sensitive to the different environment within which these fields operate.” 

John MacColl, University Librarian and Director of Library Services, added:

“St Andrews has a track record of supporting innovative Open Access platforms such as Peer J, Open Book Publishers and Knowledge Unlatched. This latest membership offers many opportunities for humanities researchers in St Andrews and beyond to make their work Open Access free of charge”

The University of St Andrews is now part of an international consortium of over 80 other institutions that financially supports OLH through membership fees. These fees cover the cost of publication and ensure that there are no author facing charges (APCs). The reason for this type of publishing system is that many researchers feel that the regular “gold” open access system, where authors have to pay APCs, is geared more towards researchers in STEM disciplines, where there is often more money available to cover such charges. For many in humanities disciplines, these charges can present a barrier to open access publication. OLH is seeking to redress this imbalance by offering an alternative publishing system that is tailored specifically to the academic landscape of the humanities.

OLH is directed by Dr Martin Paul Eve and Dr Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck, University of London. Initially, the platform was given start-up support by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Last month Birkbeck awarded OLH a further three-year grant of $741,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr Eve had this to say:

“The successful conclusion of our previous planning grant, awarded by the Foundation in 2014, has shown us that there is substantial appetite among libraries, journals and authors for a new model to achieve open access.
“By lowering costs for the international library community, while maintaining peer-review standards and professional publishing practices (such as digital preservation), the OLH offers a new and viable route to open, online publication in the humanities.” Birkbeck, University of London.

Open Library of the Humanities is set to launch in September 2015, with an initial 7 journals.

British Art Studies: new online journal announcement and call for submissions

St Andrews researchers with an interest in Art and Art History might be intrigued by this new fully peer-reviewed Open Access journal to be officially launched Autumn 2015. It is a collaboration between The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art and encourages submissions on all aspects of British art, architecture and visual culture. The editorial team is based in London and New Haven.

The editors would like submissions to make effective use of the possibilities for visually stimulating articles offered by the online format and provide a forum for debate on digital scholarship, publishing and copyright.

Credit: John Hoppner, 1758-1810, British, An Unknown British Officer, Probably of 11th (North Devonshire) Regiment of Foot, c.1800, ca. 1800, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles F. Samson in memory of Charles F. Samson, Yale College, Class of 1902. Public Domain.

Further details and Call for submissions

Writing for British Art Studies

Style Sheet

Digital Humanities and New Frontiers

At the end of November the University of St Andrews hosted the Open Access in the Humanities Roadshow. This event showcased some of the important work that is currently going on in the world of scholarly publishing, and in particular book publishing. The response to the Roadshow was overwhelmingly positive, showing that there is clearly a lot of interest in open access book publishing in the humanities. With this in mind, we wrote a blog post to highlight the work the library is doing to increase visibility and accessibility to open scholarly ebooks through our catalogue.

Copyright Quinn Dombrowski

We would like to turn back to journals with this post and point the spotlight on Frontiers, an open access publisher with a very innovative publishing platform (more on that below). Last month the publisher announced that it is making a push on humanities and social science disciplines by announcing a series of HSS journals. Frontiers in Digital Humanities is the first to be announced, and is already open for submission. Digital Humanities is a fascinating new field that exists at the point of intersection between computing and humanities disciplines, and it is great to see that Frontiers have recognised the need to develop and share exciting new research in this area. Here at St Andrews our Digital Humanities Research Librarian Dr Alice Crawford has been working to raise the Library’s profile in this field. She has developed an Islandora repository in which rare books and manuscripts from Special Collections can be digitally displayed, and is assisting staff in academic Schools with a number of other digital projects. A project to convert the University’s Biographical Register of alumni into database format is also underway. The Library is very pleased to be using a range of new digital technologies to make these historical texts and data available to the public and to be opening up new avenues for researchers to explore.  To find more information about Digital Humanities at St Andrews check out the webpage, or visit the blog.

A bit about Frontiers:
Frontiers is a publisher with a twist, since it functions on a community-driven editorial model, with over 40,000 scientists and researchers as editors. Frontiers also uses an interactive open peer review system whereby review editors and authors engage in a discussion in order to seek agreement about the review outcome. This results in a peer-review system that is transparent and quick (Frontiers has an average time of 3 months between submission and publication). All Frontiers journals are also fully Open Access.