Open Access for Research Impact: Open Access and the Humanities

• Monographs and book chapters remain important outputs 
   
• National/language specific research
   
• Integrity of the text
   
• Greater inclusion of third party material within published work – copyright issues
   
• Less grant funded research
   
• Many more independent scholars
   
• Less collaborative research
   
• Open access first emerged in the sciences - so the current model suits the sciences more; however the model is evolving

Book chapters are difficult to discover as they generally are not picked up by Google / Google Scholar or catalogues. However, once they are in an Open Access repository, they will become visible; take this example below - A changed Irish nationalism?

In Research Repository UCD:

In Google Scholar:

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship without author article processing charges (APCs). We is funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined OLH in its mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.

The OLH publishing platform supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal. Launched as an international network of scholars, librarians, programmers and publishers in January 2013, the OLH has received two substantial grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to date, and has built a sustainable business model with its partner libraries.

Its partner libraries include those of the seven Irish universities, including UCD.

All of its academic articles are subject to rigorous peer review and the scholarship the OLH publishes showcases some of the most dynamic research taking place in the humanities disciplines today – from classics, modern languages and cultures, philosophy, theology and history, to political theory, sociology, anthropology, film and new media studies, and digital humanities. 

OLH’s mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever.