After two years of preparation, we're very pleased to open our Open Access pages. We're making a new offer to authors who want to publish their books as OA, and also publishing our first new Gold OA titles, as well as issuing some 30 classic monographs in OA for the first time.

We do not see Open Access as the only future. The next decade of scholarly publishing will continue to mix open and closed books. But we do see OA as increasingly important in academic life, and it's already changing what we do as an Association. 2024 has already been a big year for us on this:

  • Our two historically free resources, the MHRA Style Guide and the electronic journal Working Papers in the Humanities (founded 2006), were both placed under Creative Commons licences for the first time.
  • An extensive review led to the Trustees agreeing comprehensive OA policies at our meetings in February and May.
  • We participated in the May-June consultation over OA rules for the next Research Excellence Framework in the UK.
  • We joined CrossRef, and began allocating our own Digital Object Identifiers.

Today sees us taking three further steps:

  • Our Open Access portal page is now open. This is a hub for all our OA resources, from the books and journal issues which are free to download through to our policy positions. We hope that our Frequently Asked Questions page will be particularly helpful.
  • We have published our first two Gold OA books in the Legenda imprint. These are entirely new titles for 2024, and more are on the way.
  • We have also republished 30 classic monographs as OA for the first time, making them completely free to the reader, under a new programme of MHRA Revivals. More of those are on the way, too.

There's a new news topic for OA matters: https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/open-access.

And the international standard sign for OA can now be seen scattered throughout this website:

An inspired monogram, or cypher, this device places an "o" inside an "a" while also taking the shape of an unlocked padlock. Originally designed for the Public Library of Science, the symbol has become ubiquitous and is, in fact, itself open access, under a CC-0 licence.

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