Open Library of Humanities Partnership Supports Open Sharing of Research

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has joined the Open Library of Humanities’ Library Partnership Subsidy system. The partnership helps support open access to scholarship in the humanities.

Access to research and knowledge that serves the public good is central to the mission of UT Knoxville. Making research and scholarship created at the university immediately available to all serves the public interest — enabling businesses, nonprofit organizations, local governments, and others to solve real-world problems. Publishing openly — that is, without cost barriers to the reader or embargoes on sharing research findings — also serves the interests of university faculty. Making their work more accessible expands the impact of their research.

By joining the international consortium of libraries that support the open-access publisher Open Library of Humanities, UT Knoxville advances the cause of providing the broadest possible access to research and scholarship.

The traditional model for scholarly publishing impedes access to knowledge by imposing a paywall between the reader and the research results. Open-access journals, on the other hand, are freely available online for everyone to read.

Furthermore, the traditional subscription-based business model for scholarly publishing has imposed an unsustainable burden on academic library budgets. In recent years, academic libraries have promoted open-access publication of university research as part of an international movement to broaden access to research and to create a more economically sustainable publishing ecosystem.

Some open-access publishers underwrite the costs of publication by assessing an Article Processing Charge from the author (or the author’s academic department). These fees can make publishing faculty research in open-access journals prohibitively expensive for the typically underfunded humanities department. The Open Library of Humanities, by contrast, does not charge authors to publish. Instead, the group is able to support the open sharing of research through payments from an international consortium of libraries.

The Open Library of Humanities currently publishes 28 open-access, peer-reviewed journals in the humanities. Scholarly journals that choose to publish on the Open Library of Humanities platform maintain their own peer review policies and editorial control. The publisher provides a dynamic platform, high-quality presentation, and digital preservation of the journals.