ATLANTA, January 26, 2015 - LYRASIS is pleased to announce that it has entered into a partnership to become the exclusive membership and administrative agent for the Open Library of Humanities in North America. With a strong history of productive partnerships in the open access field, including Knowledge Unlatched, Reveal Digital, and SCOAP3, LYRASIS is at the forefront of the rapidly changing scholarly communications landscape.
The Mellon-funded Open Library of Humanities offers a new, extremely cost-effective and equitable business model for journals to achieve gold open access in the humanities sphere. Rather than concentrating the burden of payment on the individual authors or their institution when work is accepted (as do many existing publishers), the OLH is supported by a consortium of libraries who all share the cost. In this way, we can fairly pay for the labor of publishing on a not-for-profit basis while also ensuring that anyone whose work meets the high-standards of peer review can be published with no author fee.
Of the new partnership, Dr. Martin Paul Eve, one of the founders and academic project directors of the OLH, said: "We are extremely pleased to be working with LYRASIS to reach potential library partners in the United States. We are only at the beginning of a long journey; it takes a great deal of work to build successful, mission-driven publishers. With the ever-growing support that we are receiving from libraries and academics worldwide, though, the desire for a new route is clear. We greatly look forward to working with LYRASIS and its members to build a bright, open access future for the humanities disciplines."
"OLH is engaged in important work for humanities scholarship," said Kate Nevins, the Executive Director of LYRASIS. "This program provides an opportunity for libraries to engage in a transformative model that will have a significant impact on scholarly communications. LYRASIS welcomes the opportunity to partner with OLH and gather community support for their mission."
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