ACLS Begins E-Publishing Project for History Monographs

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced on June 25th that it will receive $3 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to assist scholars collaborating with university presses in the electronic publishing of monographs in history.

The new project has five major goals: 1) to foster broader acceptance by the scholarly community of electronic monograph-length texts as valid scholarly publication, by creating electronic texts of high quality in the discipline of history; 2) to promote collaboration among ACLS, its constituent scholarly societies, university presses, and libraries in electronic publishing; 3) to create the framework for a centralized, non-commercial, electronic publication space; 4) to develop electronic publishing processes that will streamline production and make the creation and dissemination of electronic texts more cost-effective; 5) to establish the viability of publishing small-market, specialized scholarly texts in electronic format.

The ACLS constituent societies initially involved in this project are: the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for the History of Technology, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Renaissance Society of America. The new ACLS project will cooperate with the American Historical Association's Gutenberg-e project that provides prizes to develop dissertations into electronic monographs.

The seven university presses joining in this effort are: Columbia University Press, Harvard University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, New York University Press, Oxford University Press, Rutgers University Press, and the University of Michigan Press. NYU Press, as publishing coordinator, will provide a home for the project's administrative office; Carol Mandel, Dean of the NYU Libraries, Press and University Archives, will advise as the project goes forward. Dean Mandel, formerly Deputy University Librarian at Columbia University, helped to develop the Columbia Online Books Evaluation Project. Carlton Rochell, her predecessor as Dean, worked closely with ACLS in the design of this project.

The University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) will function as an initial distributor for the electronic publications in this series. DLPS, with extensive experience in creating and distributing full-text electronic texts, will work with the presses to develop standards for formatting and advise on the development of the interface, searching, access, and usage logging mechanisms for this central publication space.

For more information contact John H. D'Arms, ACLS President, Richard Ekman, Secretary, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation or visit the ACLS webpage.