We are delighted to announce that Library Services, Imperial College London has joined the Open Journals Collective. Imperial are supporting our Multidisciplinary Collection through OJC’s library membership model for diamond open access. The OJC is dedicated to transforming the way that academic research is supported and disseminated, and the support of Imperial will be instrumental in helping us achieve our objectives of making journals free to read and publish in, offering a viable alternative to commercial transformative agreements, and empowering journals to flip to diamond open access.
Library Services, Imperial College London has long been a leader and high profile advocate for open access and for a more equitable system of scholarly communication. They support the principle that “the results of research that have been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain”, and this is evident in everything they do as a library to support research. We are delighted that they have chosen to join us as part of their approach to delivering free access to research.
Ruth Harrison, Head of Scholarly Communications Management, and Charlie Leppington, Head of Liaison (Business, Engineering and Natural Sciences) at Library Services, Imperial College London, said: “At Imperial, we want to be able to support a variety of publishing models to better enable access to research, and create more equitable paths to publishing for all authors. As the institution has a STEMMB focus, we were delighted to see an open initiative providing content that aligns directly with our research and teaching interests. We also wanted to support OJC’s multidisciplinary collection because of the increased intersection across the AHSS and STEM disciplines”.
Tom Shaw, the Open Journals Collective’s Library Engagement Lead, said: “To have the support of Imperial, who are such a long-standing and well-respected leader on open access to research publications, is a great endorsement of OJC’s ambitions. I am delighted that OJC’s vision to build a sustainable future for academic journals around diamond open access has resonated with them, and I look forward to working with them through our community governance as we build the OJC community and turn our vision into reality”.
Joanna Ball, Managing Director of the Directory of Open Access Journals and OJC Director said: “We are delighted that Imperial College London is joining the Open Journals Collective. Imperial’s participation is especially important as it reflects the growing recognition that equitable, community-led open access is important in all subject areas.”