---
title: "Open Journals Collective: Making Open Access a Reality at Scale"
layout: post
image: 
    feature: "header_OJC.png"
doi: "https://doi.org/10.59348/3d7cd-prc33"
archive: "https://wayback.archive-it.org/22123/20231101171300/https://eve.gd/2025/04/02/open-journals-collective-making-open-access-a-reality-at-scale"
---
*tl;dr*: cancel your big deals and transitional agreements (they're not working) and invest in a set of hundreds of non-APC, OA titles offered by Open Journals Collective, which derives from the OLH model. Email Caroline Edwards ([at Birkbeck](mailto:caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk) [or at OJC](mailto:caroline@openjournalscollective.org)) to get involved.

This week saw the launch of the [Open Journals Collective](https://openjournalscollective.org/). My good friend and colleague, Dr Caroline Edwards, [wrote about this launch in the LSE Impact Blog](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/03/31/academic-libraries-cannot-afford-to-carry-on-with-transformative-agreements/). I wanted to say a few words of my own about the initiative, though. (Disclaimer/COI: I made the OJC website and co-founded [and ran for many years] the Open Library of Humanities.)

13 years ago, as I was writing my book, _Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future_, Caroline and I established the [Open Library of Humanities](https://www.openlibhums.org/) (OLH). At the time, publishers in the sciences were convinced that APCs were going to be the way to do gold open access. Despite the examples set by [OpenEdition](https://www.openedition.org/?lang=en), [SciELO](https://www.scielo.org/en/), [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/), [Knowledge Unlatched](https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/), and others, the warnings about the inequitable distribution systems of author-pays models were not fully heeded. Of course, fast forward to 2025 and collective models are the talk of the town, as though they have always held prominence. [Subscribe to Open](https://subscribetoopencommunity.org/), [PLOS](https://thepublicationplan.com/2021/01/21/plos-trials-a-collective-action-business-model-for-open-access-publishing/), [Bloomsbury Academic](https://www.researchinformation.info/news/bloomsbury-announces-pilot-open-access-model/), and many others are trying out or using collective funding models that avoid article or book processing charges.

What we found with our initial survey of researchers for OLH was that academics in the humanities wanted an APC of £0. Zero. Zilch. There were concerns about how they would pay in their under-funded circumstances but also a worry about corruption in the author-pays model. We'd thought they might say £300 or something. But, no, the answer was "nothing". So we developed a business model that made that possible and persuaded [hundreds of libraries around the world to support us financially](https://www.openlibhums.org/plugins/supporters/) so that we need not charge APCs. This was extremely hard, gruelling work. One day I was in Portland, Oregon, the next in Glasgow, then in Tokyo the week after. It was literally a case of visiting every university and speaking to faculty and librarians in those early days. Showing you are serious involves serious graft and it almost killed me (literally: I had a stroke in 2016).

OLH has been fully up and running for over a decade. I stepped aside from leadership duties in 2023 as my kidneys went into total failure and I needed haemodialysis. But I still remain in very close touch with the OLH team and Caroline, who is now the CEO. We showed that the model can work. Along the way, with Andy Byers, we built some [amazing platform technology that is now used by universities worldwide: Janeway](https://janeway.systems/). [We showed that we can transition for-profit, subscription journals to a not-for-profit, open access model](https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/glossa-how-a-journal-took-matters-into-their-own-hands-to-make-research-available/). And OLH now publishes 30+ high-quality, peer-reviewed, fully OA journals, with _no APCs_. Free for everyone, forever. Funded by libraries; because this aligns with their mission and because we can save them funds, without an enormous profit overhead.

But the scale of OLH could be *massively* increased. We've seen, in recent days, huge cancellations of "big deals" with publishers like Elsevier. But there's also been a rise of "transformative agreements" (TA), which are supposed to take us towards full open access. But [TAs are not working](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/04/04/transitional-agreements-arent-working-what-comes-next/). As Alison Mudditt noted, at the current rate of transition, it would take 70 years for the big give publishers to fully convert their TA titles. This wouldn't happen in my lifetime. TAs are consuming university budget resources and *would be better used to fund not-for-profit OA without APCs*.

The big idea of the Open Journals Collective is to fix that and scale the project: and *you* can support it. As the [OJC Board page shows](https://openjournalscollective.org/board/), the publisher board consists of: OLH, [Duke University Press](https://www.dukeupress.edu/), [University of Pennsylvania Press](https://www.pennpress.org/), [DOAJ](https://doaj.org/), [Edinburgh Diamond](https://library.ed.ac.uk/research-support/edinburgh-diamond), [LSE Press](https://press.lse.ac.uk/), [UCL Press](https://uclpress.co.uk/), [University of Michigan Press](https://press.umich.edu/), and [California Digital Library](https://cdlib.org/) (among others, more forthcoming), banding together to offer hundreds of journal OA titles that can replace transformative agreements and support OA without APCs. This is a way for libraries to *stop* throwing their money at bad models that entrench APCs, won't transition, and serve for-profit industries, to a serious ecosystem of mission-driven, collectively funded OA in the humanities and social sciences (and consideration of the sciences will come later in the year, too).

As [Joanna Ball of DOAJ](https://doaj.org/) [put it](https://openjournalscollective.org/): 

> "The Open Journals Collective provides a community-led, scalable opportunity for libraries to invest in trusted open access journals. DOAJ and OJC share a commitment to building an equitable and diverse scholarly publishing system, and this initiative takes an important step towards that vision."

As it was when we founded OLH, so it is now: having advice from trusted librarians is crucial. You have to get the social side of these initiatives right, and the OJC board has some [very big names in the OA library world](https://openjournalscollective.org/board/). These librarians will be steering the project, to ensure that the offering works for libraries and is right for their institutions.

So, libraries of the world: unite! This is a true, at-scale opportunity to transition to large-scale OA in the humanities and social sciences. Transitional agreements are not worth your time or your institution's budget. Instead: support something that does good in the world; something that makes knowledge available to every reader, at no charge; something that doesn't discriminate against authors who cannot pay; something that will increase the sum of truth in the world, without fuelling shareholder returns at for-profit publishers. Yes, economic times are hard for universities throughout the Global North. But by cancelling the TAs, the funding can become available. This is a realistic prospect for converting hundreds and hundreds of OA titles to sustainable models without APCs.

A list of titles available in the package will be forthcoming.

If you have any questions, or want to be involved in any way, email [Caroline Edwards at Birkbeck](mailto:caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk) or [at the Open Journals Collective](mailto:caroline@openjournalscollective.org).


## References

* Eve, Martin Paul, ‘100 People in a Room: On the Distributional Effects of Different Open-Access Funding Models’, Martin Paul Eve <https://www.martineve.com/2017/04/03/100-people-in-a-room/> [accessed 10 April 2017]
* Eve, Martin Paul, _Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future_ (Cambridge University Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012>