Current Issue

It gives us great pleasure to announce that the ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal of Asian Studies for the Liberal Arts is now a part of the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH)!

What does this mean for our readers, authors, and students?

The Open Library of the Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org/) is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded initiative aimed at engaging the international movement to create unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research.Materials that are open access are easily searchable, archivable, and promote proper attribution.The move of the ASIANetwork Exchange to the Open Library of the Humanities allows us to bring ourselves in-line with the 2015 goals of the United Nations, which has asserted “...that universal access to information and knowledge is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue.”It will make our journal more visible to prospective readers around the globe.

As we began thinking about increasing the quality and position of the ASIANetwork Exchange and learned about the Open Access movement, it was clear that our organization should embrace this international effort more fully.ASIANetworkhas been mindful of colleagues and students in Asia whose libraries do not possess the resources for them to gain easy access to our materials.Making sure that our research and pedagogy articles can be easily identified, read, and used in Asia, as well as other parts of the globe, has been an important objective.ASIANetwork Exchange is a gold, open access journal; prospective readers have access to all of our articles immediately and directly through our website. The partnership with the Open Library of Humanities will also ensure the digital preservation of our published material along with its integration in the global Digital Object Identifier system (DOI), ensuring that this work remains accessible in perpetuity.

Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London and a founder of the OLH, said: “it is absolutely fantastic that ASIANetwork Exchange has joined the Open Library of Humanities. Our mission is to create a world where humanities and social-scientific research is accessible to those who are interested, not just to those who can pay. This involves substantial thinking about the way we fund research publication but also drives to the heart of why we write and publish. ASIANetwork Exchange has been at the forefront of this thinking, independently carving its own open access path, doing the right thing but striking out alone. By uniting with our infrastructure and funding model (in which many libraries all pay a small amount so that we can make work freely available), however, we hope to cement the future of this journal while preserving its forward-thinking past. It is a meeting of minds to fulfil a common mission for the public good. It is a partnership that makes eminent sense.”