As part of a wider emphasis on digital publishing and the relevance of humanities scholarship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEH) are giving new life to out-of-print humanities books. In January the two organizations announced a new joint pilot grant program, Humanities Open Book, which will help publishers identify important out-of-print works, secure rights to them, and convert them to EPUB format ebooks freely accessible under a Creative Commons (CC) license. Awards range from $50,000 to $100,000 per recipient, and will cover a period of one to three years.
Scholarly books and monographs in the humanities have a relatively short print run, and works published since 1923 are not in the public domain. While some emerging models, such as Knowledge Unlatched or the crowdfunded Unglue.it, aim to bring back out-of-print titles that are still under copyright as open access, DRM-free ebooks, the Humanities Open Book Program (HOB) calls specifically on academic presses, scholarly societies, museums, and other institutions that publish work of humanities scholarship to identify backlist items that they deem worthy of reviving.
During the past century, NEH stated, “tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to ‘unlock’ these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.”
Potential publishers are asked to provide a list of the books they wish to digitize, with brief descriptions of their content and scholarly value—according the program guidelines, they “must be of demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.” Publishers must also give a history and overview of their organization, a description of the digitization service provider, a work plan, and a budget. The proposal deadline is June 10, with winners announced in December and projects commencing in January 2016.
Finished ebooks are to be formatted as EPUB 3.0.1 files (or a later version) in order to provide fully searchable and scalable text that will be readable on any device. Publishers may choose between six CC licenses, and are free to produce versions in additional formats such as PDF or KF8/AZW3 for Kindle, as well as charging a fee for any print-on-demand or value-added versions. Embedded metadata must be in conformance with the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Best Practices for Product Metadata. Within these restrictions, says Brett Bobley, NEH chief information officer and director of the Office of Digital Humanities, finished books should be of high quality and accessible to the general public. “I want these to be eminently readable books,” he told LJ, “so that when you look at [the book] you say, ‘that’s a great piece of scholarship,’ and the fact that it’s an ebook is immaterial. It’s a great book, not just a great ebook.”
JOINING FORCES
Bobley first conceived of HOB several years ago while considering NEH’s 50th anniversary in 2015. “I was lamenting the fact that we have been funding, or helping to fund, all these amazing books over the last 50 years,” he told LJ. NEH has sponsored the research and writing of thousands of scholars, “yet it seems like the vast majority of those books only sell a small number of copies and then rather quickly go out of print. I started thinking to myself, what are some ways that we could take all these terrific books and make them more widely available to people?”
Bobley began gathering input from publishers, librarians, scholars, and fellow funders, all of whom were enthusiastic. But when he spoke with Donald Waters, senior program officer of the Mellon Foundation’s Scholarly Communications department, and program officer Helen Cullyer, they not only liked the concept but suggested that Mellon partner with NEH to administer the grants. NEH was eager to collaborate, said Bobley. “It doesn’t happen too often that another funder wants to jump in, and likes an idea so much that they want to participate as well.”
In December 2014 the Mellon Foundation board approved an initial commitment of $500,000, and a request for proposals (RFP) was issued in January. NEH and Mellon—the largest funders of humanities research in the United States—have jointly committed $1 million. They will divide the final applications, and process them according to each of their standard policies and procedures. Waters explained that “the biggest difference in the grantmaking policies of the two organizations is that NEH provides funding for overhead, while the Mellon Foundation does not. NEH and Mellon will ensure that potential grantees understand this and any other differences in grant conditions and requirements prior to final approval.” Both will work together to choose outside peer reviewers.
INVESTING IN THE HUMANITIES
The Mellon Foundation has its own long history of supporting digital scholarship and innovation in the humanities. In 2001 it provided some $3.2 million in grants to help the University of Chicago Press (UCP) partner with a number of academic presses nationwide to develop BiblioVault—initially a repository to digitize and store backlist titles for print-on-demand. “The early funding had to do with getting books digitized,” explained UCP director Garrett Kiely. “The first 15 or 17 thousand books were part of the funding. Then as time went on we developed a fee for those kinds of services,” which allowed BiblioVault to become a self-sustainable operation, eventually evolving into an ebook storage repository and distribution center.
Another precursor, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) History E-Book Project (HEB), received a five-year, $3 million grant from Mellon in 1999 to select, digitize, and license born-digital ebooks as well as backlist titles. According to Nina Gielen, HEB managing editor, the initial emphasis was on creating a replicable system for interactive titles with a strong research and development component to the grant. The project, renamed Humanities E-Book in 2007, has been self-sustaining for the past decade largely due to its subscription model, and the fact that most of its 4,300 titles are composed of page image scans, rather than coded.
Gielen felt that the digitization work outlined in the HOB proposal might be challenging to sustain long-term, but could be offset by value-added features. “I think multiple formats might be a good way of… presses to monetizing their efforts in some other form,” she suggested to LJ, adding that the outcome of the pilot will be interesting to follow.
On NEH’s side, HOB is part of an agency-wide initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, developed by new chairman William (Bro) Adams to highlight the importance and relevance of humanities scholarship to public life. The initiative’s associated projects will frame the contemporary study of humanities through a series of questions on such matters as technology, security, biomedical issues, recent wars and conflicts, the country’s changing demographics, and increasing political polarization.
While not required, NEH invites HOB applicants to propose books relating to these areas, and Bobley emphasizes that publishers should consider popular appeal as well as scholarly value. “There are plenty of people outside of academia who would love to read a lot of these humanities books, but I think they just have never been marketed to a general readership before. One thing the long tail of the Internet has taught us is that there are people who are interested in almost any topic you can think of. And I suspect that we will surface some books that will become really popular.”
In addition to scholarly presses, Bobley wants to see libraries applying for grants. While he envisions university libraries approaching faculty members, he also imagines public libraries looking for local authors. “I can imagine libraries, for example, playing an aggregating role,” he told LJ, “bringing together authors and digitizing their books as a group, and using [the program] to help fund that.”
Bobley hopes that HOB ebooks will be well-publicized by publishers and academic institutions, and also as part of the Digital Public Library of America, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. “At the end of the day,” said Bobley, “scholarly communications is about communications. It’s about getting scholarly ideas out to an audience. Most humanities books are not best sellers…. Let’s see if we can come up with creative ways of getting that material spread as widely as possible.”