So it looks as though the long-awaited, messianic “tipping point” has come for the Open Access movement, particularly in the UK. RCUK have mandated and, it seems likely that HEFCE will mandate, a combination of green and gold routes to open access scholarship. Predictably, though, owing to the way in which “gold” has been made synonymous with “article processing charges” in the popular academic imagination, the resistance has not abated.

I am currently leading a project, along with Dr. Caroline Edwards, called the Open Library of Humanities. We’ve solicited a great deal of academic capital in order to address as much of the social problem ahead of the technological, along with an innovative funding model of distributed Library Partnership Subsidies (LPS).

In this session, we’d like to tell you more about the project but also begin a discussion around the technological elements that could feed into the success of a massive humanities megajournal system. The primary aspects that we’d like to talk about are:

1. Pluses and pitfalls of existing journal implementations (Ambra, OJS etc.)
2. TEI or NLM? Best route to an automated workflow including XML-first typesetting
3. Third-party technological partnerships vs. in-housing for independent OA projects