Impact case study database

Research being made freely available to all through open access has huge potential benefits for researchers, educational institutions, business, and society at large. Open access is the most significant global change for academic publishing in a generation. It has grown exponentially: the Directory of Open Access Journals listed 300 titles in 2003 but 15,000 in 2020¹. Open access addresses key issues such as the spiralling cost of subscribing to academic journals and global inequalities in access to resources². It has been deemed crucial by organisations as diverse as the US Federal Government, UNESCO, and The Wellcome Trust. UK funding body UKRI now stipulates that outputs from their funded research must be open access, supporting the principle of publicly funded research being publicly available. The cost to convert to open access using dominant economic models, however, remains exorbitant (particularly using APCs) and problematic, with publicly funded research sold back to the public (often via a for-profit entity) with the intermediary bodies generating significant (and often growing) profit margins.

It is within this context that Edwards and Eve founded, and continue to lead (as co CEOs), the Open Library of Humanities which pioneered an alternative approach for open access, offering a value-driven, collectivist business model that is equitable for both authors and readers.

The OLH publishes world-leading, rigorous and peer-reviewed scholarship across the humanities disciplines in 28 fully open access journals, with no article processing charges. Instead, it is a financially self-sustaining model with 300 libraries worldwide pooling their resources to convert (‘flip’) journals wholesale to open access, which are then hosted on the OLH platform.³ More research is consequently openly available worldwide with commensurate benefits to the public and developing economies. Moreover, partner institutions have a say in the decisions of the OLH. As more sign-up, the cost per institution comes down. Its practical success and the research underpinning it have changed the behaviour of governments, funders, journal editors, business and others worldwide. It has become ‘the standard international reference point for such models’, leading ‘to many publishers transitioning to OA with many more yet to come. It is looked to as the example of how things could be different’⁴.

The British Library, for instance, recognising the onerous nature of other models, ‘believes that a lack of funding should not be an obstacle for scholars who wish to make their research as openly available as possible. It is for this reason that we are proud to join the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) as an institutional member.’^5a, University Libraries joined OLH because it is academic-led and an exemplary approach to sustainable open-access publishing^5b. The transformative nature of the OLH is such that several institutions choose to financially support it at more than double the required rate^5c. Although the OLH was launched and primarily focused on the Anglophone world, others have been inspired by its example and have taken it upon themselves to become advocates for its expansion. OLH-DE, launched in March 2018 and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, actively promotes the OLH in Germany, aiming to attract German libraries as participating institutions, and German-language journals to ‘flip’ to open access using the OLH platform^5d.

The OLH has positively impacted library expenditure worldwide, one example was the resignation of the editorial board of the Elsevier journal Lingua in 2015 to establish a new open access journal, Glossa, hosted and underpinned by the OLH. The University of California Library System subsequently made a ‘deliberate decision’ to cancel their subscription to Lingua^6a.

In addition to its benefits to libraries, a significant aspect of the OLH is that it provides a sustainable economic model for journals and publishers that agree with open access but have hitherto been reliant on subscriptions and article processing charges to ensure a sufficient income. As examples, Liverpool University Press has converted Quaker Studies and Francospheres to full open access^7a and the University of Wales Press has done similarly for the International Journal of Welsh Writing in English^7b. Open access helps these value-driven publishers fulfil a greater purpose. Open access helps fulfil this objective by enabling their publications to be available to the broader public as well as academics. The economics of other models, however, had proved prohibitive. The OLH model, on the other hand, was not only invaluable in achieving open access to this title, but also ensured the viability of the journal in an important subject in UWP’s mission. Prior to working with the OLH, the journal’s very existence was in doubt, given the relatively modest market and consequent need for funding to bring it to publication as a subscription model.^7b.

Six Learned Societies – the European Architectural History Network, the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, the Association for Laboratory Phonology, The Marvell Society, and the ASIANetwork (a consortium of over 170 North American colleges) – have converted all their publications to open access through the OLH. As an editor noted, they wanted to convert the journal to open access. Article processing charges, however, were exclusionary and they wanted a model that was free both to readers and to authors. They encountered Eve’s research and decided to host the journal on the OLH from September 2015. From then until December 2019, they had 16,553 article downloads. In just 2019, they had 28,317 unique article views (of the on-page versions of articles). This represents a substantial escalation in reach and helps the society to fulfil its mission.⁸.

Aside from its direct beneficiaries, the OLH has positively impacted businesses including Érudit, a Canadian consortium which provides access to more than 150 journals, books and other research outputs, 97% of which is open access. As of May 2017, it recorded 23 million page views annually, with 70% of users based outside Canada. In 2016, it began an important shift in its business model to convert commercial agreements with Canadian libraries to an open access model based on partnerships and the OLH was one of the core sources that Érudit used.^9a. Another business that has benefited from the OLH is the major open access publisher PLOS, which runs the world’s largest journal, PLOS One, and has net assets worth $10.7 million (i.e. USD10,700,000) and total revenues in 2018 of $31.7 million (or USD31,700,000). PLOS has traditionally relied on article processing charges as its primary revenue strategy but recognises their exclusionary characteristics and their limitations regarding the distribution of funds. Accordingly, PLOS have adopted new business models intended to make open access publishing more equitable by removing barriers to publishing. PLOS felt confident that such drastic changes could (and had to) be made given the success of other transformative initiatives like Open Library of the Humanities, which demonstrates their viability financially and their alignment with the mission-driven academic libraries.^9b.

The OLH and particularly Eve have deeply influenced and altered the policies that will be implemented by cOAlition S from 2021 onwards, a body of 25 research funders, headed by the European Commission and including UKRI, the World Health Organisation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Their ‘Plan S’ requires research to be made publicly available upon publication, without delay, with no embargo period. Eve’s research ‘led to several revisions to the Plan S guidelines, emphasizing the need for diverse business models and that APCs (article processing charges) should not be the sole means of achieving Open Access.’ Eve’s research has been particularly influential in its advocacy of diamond open access, referring to models in which neither readers nor authors are charged to read and publish. cOAlition S commissioned a study into these models, based on Eve’s research, and are using this to inform yheir policies. This has been instrumental in the commitment of various national research agencies – including the Dutch NWO and the Austrian FWF, and charitable foundations such as the Wellcome Trust – to support diamond platforms, such as the OLH.^6c This has affected thousands of funded researchers, worldwide.¹⁰.

A particularly thorny issue has been the economics of converting monographs to open access (OA). Eve’s research on this has led directly to Research England announcing its intention to mandate OA books in the REF after next.⁴. It also led to the £3m COPIM project to develop the necessary infrastructure for transitioning monographs to OA, and, the mass transition of presses that we are seeing worldwide is potentially the most significant direct impact of Eve’s research. For example, Eve’s work in early 2020 as part of the COPIM project led to the transition of the Central European University Press to an open-access model; a complete conversion with a new model for OA books – “Opening the Future” – that will now spread to other presses worldwide.⁴