Open Access at MHRA

Open Access is a new form of publication, made possible by the Internet, under which everyone has free access. MHRA is a charity serving both scholars and the wider public, and we use Open Access to help us in both goals. We make OA available to authors with as much flexibility as we can, and we use OA ourselves to make some of our own resources available to all.

Across our website, look out for the international standard OA symbol in catalogue listings and book galleries.

With OA, the details matter, so full answers can be found on our Open Access Frequently Asked Questions page.

OA for Authors

Our two imprints, Legenda and Texts and Translations, expect to publish a mix of closed and open titles over the next decade.

Authors can choose between open and closed when their books are accepted (or in some cases later), though if they make the open choice, they need to find Gold OA funding from their employer or a funding body. This is currently set at £6000 per title, including VAT, regardless of length.

Contributions to our electronic journal Working Papers in the Humanities are automatically Gold OA at no charge. (See the JISC Sherpa Romeo record for WPH here.) We do not offer Gold OA for individual articles in our other journals, such as Modern Language Review, but we do have a permissive policy on self-archiving (“Green OA”) for such articles.

For full details, see the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Open Resources

The MHRA Style Guide, our single most widely-used book, is Gold OA.

The whole run of our electronic journal Working Papers in the Humanities is Gold OA.

New Books

In spring 2024 we began to release new books in Gold OA for the first time. More are on the way.

MHRA Revivals

MHRA was founded in 1918, but began issuing books only in 1970. Many of our early titles featured in a series called Texts and Dissertations, which in many ways was a forerunner of our current imprint for new research, Legenda. Physical copies of volumes 1 to 60 are now very hard to obtain, and their distributor for many years, Turpin Books, is out of business.

While these titles can still be found in larger research libraries, we receive frequent enquiries from would-be readers. These books are often first monographs by authors who went on to become major critics, and in some cases they are still the best or even the only book on their topic. As a service to the scholarly community, then, MHRA has begun a programme of reviving the early T&Ds as Gold OA ebooks, which anybody can download and read at no charge.

Volumes 1 to 40 are already revived, taking the story up to 1995, with volumes 41 to 60, covering 1996-2004, in preparation. See a catalogue listing of our revivals so far and the full gallery of all our published Gold OA titles.