The ACLS Open Access Book Prizes reward exceptional humanistic scholarship that has been published openly, demonstrating its relevance within and beyond academia. Here are some lessons learned during the competition’s first year.
In July 2023, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where I serve as project manager for the Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship initiative, opened a new competition for open access books. Generously supported by Arcadia, the ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award are the first of their kind and—with awards of $20,000 for winning authors and $30,000 for winning publishers—among the largest for humanistic scholarship.
The competition offers a new way to engage monograph authors and their publishers in the open access movement. Our goal? To attract the attention of scholars writing books in the humanities and interpretive social sciences and to raise the prestige of open access publishing in their eyes.
Connecting with authors outside of STEM fields has proven to be a significant challenge for open access advocates. Despite data demonstrating the extraordinary reach of open access monographs, as well as the diligent efforts of librarians to raise awareness, many scholars remain unaware or unconvinced of the benefits open access offers. Those who are on board often struggle to secure the necessary funding or to persuade their publishers-of-choice to consider open publication. Meanwhile stories of tenure or search committees undervaluing open access work serve as effective cautionary tales.
Navigating fiercely competitive and often opaque waters, many career academics understandably hesitate to stray from the conventional wisdom. But the technological revolutions of the past three decades, from email to AI, have transformed the ways scholars teach and conduct research. Publication has adapted more slowly despite (or perhaps because of) its status as the most important currency for scholars. Today, the emergent technology options for digital publishing are quickly maturing while long-standing cultural expectations for academic success persist. This situation creates no small measure of confusion and anxiety, especially among early-career scholars, for whom the stakes are higher than ever.
What remains unchanged is that academic career advancement depends upon a system of reward and prestige. How often and where scholars publish their work are among the most important criteria in their evaluation. Yet even as many authors embrace an ethos of publicly engaged scholarship and seek to connect with audiences beyond the academy—a mindset entirely compatible with open access—the long-standing requirements for advancement have not evolved in kind.
The ACLS Open Access Book Prizes seek to demonstrate that publishing scholarship openly is not a marker of inferior work. Indeed, open access scholarship from reputable publishers undergoes the same level of scrutiny and refinement through the peer review and editorial processes as do printed books—which in fact are often available for sale alongside open access editions.
Making such realities clearer to authors and administrators is an essential step toward encouraging more publishers to offer open access options. The ACLS Open Access Book Prizes seek to reward exceptional scholarship that has been published openly in truly accessible ways, both for authors and for the audiences they hope to reach. In the end, alongside its essential role in credentialing scholars, humanistic research must also connect with wider audiences to demonstrate its relevance around the world and beyond academia—to funders, policy makers, taxpayers, and students.
The first year of the book prizes was a true experiment. ACLS, best known among scholars for its robust support of individual researchers, boasts a seasoned staff adept at running competition programs for academic grants and fellowships. The diverse ACLS community of 81 scholarly societies and affiliates, many of whom run their own book prizes, provided welcome advice and guidance, as did an advisory committee composed of scholars, librarians, open access advocates, and digital accessibility experts. In the end, we developed a submissions entry form that incorporated elements from both traditional grant applications and book prize nominations. We wanted to ensure that our prize reviewers and judges had enough information about each nominated book—the quality and impact of its research findings as well as the process behind its open publication—to recognize titles that excelled on both fronts.
The 2024 competition offered prizes in two categories—History and Multimodal—for monographs published between 2017 and 2022.
The choices of the eligible copyright year range and the History category were largely data driven, with numbers helpfully provided in late 2023 by OAPEN and Project Muse. We could see from their metrics that the number of open access books on both platforms began to increase dramatically around 2017, and that the two largest subject areas for books were history and literary studies. Unsure as to how many submissions we were likely to receive in the competition’s first year, we chose History as one category likely to elicit a strong response.
The second category, Multimodal, was selected as a vote of confidence for new forms of digital publication that also emerged during these years. Multimodal platforms developed by scholars and publishers, often with support from Mellon, allow authors and publishers to experiment with integrating digital content—such as audio/video files, archival sources, and interactive data visualizations or maps—with written text. Some platforms also allow for nonlinear structures and rich linking that extend the project’s presentation far beyond the confines of a printed book. Expecting that we would receive far fewer submissions in the Multimodal category than in the History category, we accepted nominations in any humanistic discipline.
Entries in both categories were required to be monographs, which we define in our eligibility criteria as “long-form scholarly arguments on a single subject in the humanities or interpretative social sciences.” Our rationale here is that monographs are still widely regarded as the most important form of humanistic scholarship, required by most research institutions for tenure and promotion. We were also guided by Michael Elliott’s 2015 article “The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era,” which convincingly argues for the continued relevance of the monograph even as it adapts to the online environment. A focus on monographs seemed in line with our hope of persuading scholars that open access can coexist with groundbreaking and impactful scholarship. In the end we received a total of 112 submissions—89 in History and 23 in Multimodal—from 46 publishers based in nine countries. The majority of publishers were university presses, but we also received entries from commercial, scholar-led, library, and society presses.
The process of selecting finalists and winners took place in two rounds. After an internal eligibility check, a panel of five—including scholars, librarians, and digital scholarship specialists—for each category closely reviewed and individually scored the submissions. The panels then met over Zoom to discuss the scores and select five finalists. From there a new team of three judges in each category read each finalist in its entirety and submitted a written assessment of each project, along with their preliminary rankings. The judges then met over Zoom to decide the winner in each category.
The five finalists in each category demonstrate the breadth of open access subject matter as well as the diversity of approaches to open book publication. The History finalists identified various reasons for choosing to publish open access, but a strong sense of obligation to communities beyond western academia was a common theme. Susan Burch, author of Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), notes that “Opening up the fields of disability and Native American history to readers who might not otherwise know this story, or ways of studying it, drove the project … Having the format, content, and approach to this book align with the values propelling it pointed directly to open access.” Sami Schalk, author of Black Disability Politics (Duke University Press, 2022), says, “It became clear to me early on that if I wanted the book to influence and reach the audience I wanted to reach—Black disabled people, Black activists, and Black academics—then I needed to make it accessible.”
Hwisang Cho, author of The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) says he “took into account how hard it could be to access academic titles like mine for a small band of readers interested in premodern Korea, let alone for readers outside Anglophone academia.” Mytheli Sreenivas’s book Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press, 2021) considers the question of how “reproduction became seen as a kind of social problem in India’s modern history.“ For Sreenivas, “publishing open access has enabled me to align the book’s arguments, which question certain dominant and elite ideas about the history of population and reproduction, with the book’s accessibility, which is now available to most anyone with an internet connection.”
The Multimodal finalists, meanwhile, recognized that new digital forms combined with open access distribution create powerful and equitable ways to share their research with wider audiences. As A. D. Carson, author of the peer-reviewed rap album i used to love to dream (University of Michigan Press, 2020, Fulcrum platform), explains, “It seems unethical to me to insist that historically maligned cultures and the people excluded from academia allow their history and hard work to be extracted and exploited so that academic interlopers can become ‘experts’ and then tell the people living the culture all about themselves.” Francesca Coppa, author of Vidding; A History (University of Michigan Press, 2022, Fulcrum platform) shares Carson’s ethical concerns: “Vids are transformative works made and shared freely in a creative community. It seemed wrong to put them behind any kind of paywall or to create a scholarly work about vidding that vidders themselves couldn’t access easily. A work should live in and among the artists it discusses!”
Sharing ideas in compelling ways was also a driving force for the Multimodal finalists. Massmo Riva, author of Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022, Scalar platform), describes his subject—“how we can trace immersive experiences in contemporary digital technology back to similar imaginative experiences provided by analog devices”—as “perfectly suited for a born-digital publication.” “By “combining scholarly accuracy and interactive features (models and simulations) aimed at the general reader,” Riva says, the digital open access format allowed him to reach a broad audience.
Whitney Trettien too found that an open digital format allowed for a merging of form and content in ways that a conventional print book could not. Her book Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press, 2021, Manifold platform) is “about a family of women who—in rural, seventeenth-century England—cut up religious texts and prints and pasted the fragments back together into beautiful religious ‘harmonies.’” Trettien writes:
These feminist collages could not have been published in print at the time; their maximalist design refuses to be mediated in movable type … In order to appreciate the creative interventions of these delightfully unique books, my reader would need to see them, to explore their page layout and source texts on their own, to interact with them in new ways. And so I turned to open access digital publishing as a means of sharing this remarkable archive with a new audience.
The winning titles both exemplify a strong commitment to presenting groundbreaking scholarship in accessible ways that engage readers from a variety of communities.
A judge for the History category described the winning title, Simon P. Newman’s Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (University of London Press, 2022), which explores the lives of enslaved people in seventeenth-century London, as “a deeply researched, well-argued, and effectively presented look into a hidden world within seventeenth-century London, that of slaves in the imperial capital” that “challenges the field to tackle important and challenging topics that still resonate.” Newman, Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American History (Emeritus), University of Glasgow, and Honorary Research Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says that he “wanted to write a book that would be easily available to any interested readers, academic or not.” For Newman, open access publication led to “various collaborations with filmmakers, playwrights, composers, and the creation of a graphic novel for use in Scottish schools.”
The Multimodal category winner, As I Remember It: Teachings (ʔəms tɑʔɑw)from the Life of a Sliammon Elder (University of British Columbia Press, 2019, RavenSpace platform), offers generations of tribal wisdom articulated by Elsie Paul, Elder of the Tla’amin people and recipient of the Canadian Historical Association’s Lifetime Achievement award. Her coauthors include two of her grandchildren—Davis McKenzie and Harmony Johnson—as well as Paige Raibmon, a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. A judge for the Multimodal category describes the project’s “massive” intellectual contributions: “Preserving a lost language, culture, and folkways. The aspects of what has been lost to colonialism and racism are acknowledged while being clear about what heritage is being preserved. It also allows for persons new to the ideas, language, and culture to experience it in ways that approach being authentic, not mediated by other groups of institutions.”
Open access is an integral part of the project. McKenzie explains that the book does not “offer up an online Elder to replace the familial and ceremonial interactions where teachings are given, received, transmitted,” but provides instead “an acknowledgment that new tools exist that can support our existence and healing as a people. Open access has made a way to hear unexpected voices and versions of history that have been silent too long.”
“I feel we’ve all come a long way in exposure of our culture,” says Paul. “Not only within my own community, but now it’s come this far, that it’s out there. And I’m just very humbled by it.”
Over the next two years, the publishers of the winning titles—the University of London Press and the University British Columbia Press—will each select at least two forthcoming titles to publish as open access, supported by the $30,000 Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. In this way the book prizes encourage the continuation of open access publishing at these two presses and provide opportunities for new authors to participate.
Eligible categories in the competition’s second year have doubled to four: Environmental Humanities, History, Literary Studies, and Multimodal. Submissions for the 2025 prizes closed in September 2024, and the new winners will be announced later this year. In the meantime, ACLS continues to promote the 2024 finalists and winners as exemplary works of open scholarship to our community of academic societies while also building connections between these works and readers beyond the academy. Amplifying these compelling books allows ACLS to extend its efforts to “advance public understanding of the importance of humanistic knowledge to the enrichment of individual lives and to the robust resilience of democratic societies.” In the words of finalist Susan Burch: “Rather than consider open access simply as a format, let’s think of it as a catalyst to co-create more accessible humanistic scholarship.”
10.1146/katina-01082025-1
