20th July 2021
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) have signed a three-year collective agreement that provides multi-year support for OLH from all of the BTAA’s fifteen member libraries. This move was made possible thanks to the OLH Open Consortial Offer, an initiative that offers consortia, societies, networks and scholarly projects the opportunity to join the Open Library of Humanities Library Partnership Subsidy system as a bloc, enabling each institution to benefit from a discount. The Big Ten Academic Alliance members are: Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the United States’ preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the Provosts of the member universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its headquarters in Champaign, Illinois.
The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Dr Lisbet Rausing and Professor Peter Baldwin, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee. This enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with no financial charges to readers or authors.
More here: https://www.openlibhums.org/news/459/