Huge announcement from Open Library of Humanities (OLH) lead Caroline Edwards, writing for LSE Impact:
According to Jisc’s own review of transitional agreements in the UK published in March 2024, “it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA.” These same deals expired at the end of 2024. By all accounts, negotiations for renewals have stalled, which brings the prospect of a collapse in nationally agreed digital services to university libraries closer. Those of us working in not-for-profit “diamond” open access publishing, such as myself, argue that now is the time to divest entirely.
Enter the Open Journals Collective, modeled on its successful books counterpart—and really the culmination of OLH’s decade-plus pioneering of the library-membership approach to diamond OA.
Today […] is therefore a timely moment to be launching the Open Journals Collective (OJC) – an equitable, sustainable, community-led alternative to the big deals offered by corporate academic publishers. Drawing on more than a decade of digital publishing innovation, the OJC confronts the crisis in academic journals publishing with a viable path towards bringing journals publishing back in-house at universities.
[…]
In January 2026, the OJC will launch a collection of hundreds of journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Discussions are underway whether to offer a collection of science, technology, engineering, and maths journals too. We will fund the costs of publishing these journals diamond open access through a library membership model. This allows journals with precarious income and a high degree of volunteer labour to stabilise their production and become sustainable longer term. From 2027 onwards, in the second year of the programme, we will open applications for mission-aligned publishers to join OJC and receive funding for their diamond open access journals. We’ll also encourage academic editors to “flip” journals away from commercial and subscription models to diamond open access at OJC.
So excited about this! Here comes the mission-aligned funding exchange.