Founded by academics and technologists at Birkbeck, University of London.
Built for the future of scholarly communications by the Open Library of Humanities.
Our story
How we came into being
Janeway was developed by software engineers at the Open Library of Humanities to provide a not-for-profit digital publishing platform.
What is Janeway?
Janeway is an intuitive and adaptable platform for digital publishing that helps you manage manuscript submissions, including review, copyediting, typesetting and publication. We founded it on open-source principles and will never write paywall features into the software. Janeway is released under a copyleft license, which protects it from commercial acquisition and ensures that it will remain truly open and community-governed.
We designed Janeway to be sustainable, drawing on the most durable and promising web application technologies. The platform is built in Python using Django. Python was chosen for its readability and flexibility, its vibrant open-source ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, and its dedicated communities of developers, scientists, and researchers.
The OLH
The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning publisher of academic scholarship. The OLH team built Janeway because we wanted to replace commercial software and ensure our publishing workflows could be entirely open source and not-for-profit. Rather than a publisher relying on a technological service provider, we are a university publisher that builds its own technology.
This allows us to draw on our international network of academic editors, authors, and reviewers for continual feedback and suggestions for improved features and functionality. Building Janeway as a platform for our own academic journals has meant we can help other university publishers achieve the same goal of investing in not-for-profit technology that is sustainable.
Birkbeck
Our team of expert technologists and humanities scholars are based at Birkbeck, University of London. Though we work remotely in different countries, our home is the vibrant and leafy Bloomsbury quarter, known as the intellectual and literary capital of London and home to some of the UK’s most established publishers.
Timeline
This section is visually styled to resemble a clock face or speedometer, with a hand or needle pointing to the currently selected year.
Caroline Edwards and Martin Eve found the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) and secure seed funding (£90,000) from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support preparations for the OLH launch.
Martin publishes Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014), exploring the history of open access publishing in the humanities.
Caroline and Martin secure a major grant of $741,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in July. They officially launch the OLH in September with seven humanities journals, including the OLH “megajournal,” using software provided by Ubiquity Press.
John Wiley & Sons Inc, a global provider of knowledge services, acquires the publishing software company Atypon for $120 million in cash.
Andy Byers joins the OLH to build a new open-source publishing platform, Janeway. They place it under a copyleft license (AGPL v3) to protect it from potential future commercial acquisition. Their caution proves well-founded in August, when Elsevier acquires BePress, an independent academic software provider originally founded in 1999 at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mauro Sanchez joins the OLH tech team as Senior Publishing Technologies Developer, bringing expertise in publishing and technical architecture.
The OLH migrates its journals from Ubiquity Press to Janeway. The OLH tech team rapidly develops new features to meet the needs of a community of publishers now using Janeway. They begin a hosted service, which helps secure OLH’s long-term sustainability.
F1000 Research, an open research publishing platform, is acquired by Taylor & Francis – part of Informa plc, a British-based media group valued at over £3 billion. This commercialises a previously community-owned infrastructure.
The Arcadia Fund awards Birkbeck a £200,000 grant during the COVID-19 pandemic to support Janeway’s expansion, enabling hosted publishing services for other university publishers. This funding allows OLH to hire Joe Muller as a Publishing Technologies Developer.
Berlin-based academic publishing giant De Gruyter acquires Ubiquity Press. At the OLH, Katherine Parker-Hay joins the team and works to establish user experience research into the development cycle.
The OLH tech team grows to six staff members with the addition of Steph Driver as a Publishing Technologies Developer and Siobhan Haimé as a Publishing Technologies Librarian. They also host the first Janeway Symposium at Birkbeck, University of London, uniting publishing partners, software engineers, and academic editors.
The OLH establishes a working group to develop a Publishing Technology Board and collaborates with the California Digital Library on a user experience (UX) project.
Janeway axioms
Never accept paywalls.
Remain committed to the open-access nature of the platform. Publicly promise never to write paywall features into Janeway.
Changes must be open.
Develop Janeway in the open (copyleft license AGPL v3), allowing anyone to comment on, make feature suggestions for, or contribute to the codebase.
Drink your own beer.
Use the platform you develop. Craft a platform based on real-world insights and needs, and share it with others who have the same problems to solve.
Learn from sci-fi and pop culture.
Use pop culture and sci-fi to imagine different futures, whether through interface design, business principles or work practices.
Design for humans.
Focus on what is possible when scholars, technologists and open-source activists work on shared problems. Build around real user communities, to keep alive the spirit of collaboration and friendship that started the project.