Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), recently paid a visit to Johns Hopkins University Press. That publisher—the oldest university press in the United States—has been turning out scholarly works since 1878. “In one room, they have a copy of every book they’ve ever published. The shelves go up a couple of stories,” Bobley says. Yet only a few of those titles are available to the reading public. “Most of the rest are out of print,” he notes.
The Humanities Open Book program, a joint project of NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to put old but enduring works of humanistic scholarship back in circulation. The program, with $1 million in funding, will sponsor the republication of as many as 1,000 out-of-print titles in a digital format. Books under consideration range from a natural history of bees to a study of 18th-century British women writers.
“This is a chance to make available great books that your corner bookstore or local library couldn’t possibly stock,” Bobley says. “The Internet allows us to deliver them to a much wider audience.” Under the program, publishers will receive support to release selected titles as e-books. In doing so, they must use a Creative Commons license—an open access arrangement that will make the e-book content “free forever, to everyone in the world,” Bobley explains. Before re-issuing a given book, a publisher must obtain the approval of its author. But Bobley expects that few authors will object to Creative Commons licensing. “Most scholarly books are written by professors,” he says. “They don’t expect to make money from a book that’s been out of print for 10 years.”
John Willinsky, the Khosla Family Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, says that funding has steadily eroded for monographs in the humanities. At the same time, he notes, online publishing has become common for academic journals: “The book is being left behind.” (Willinsky is also founding director of the Public Knowledge Project, an initiative that aims to expand the reach of scholarly publishing through open source software.)
Any nonprofit publisher of scholarly works can nominate titles for the initiative, and those books will be subject to a peer review process in which experts from diverse fields will take part. NEH plans to announce a complete selection of titles by the end of this year, and the first set of e-books will be available by 2016. “The choice won’t be easy,” Bobley says. Indeed, as Willinsky points out, each book under consideration already underwent peer review before its original publication and was then reviewed by critics after its release. “This is the third round of scrutiny,” he says. The Humanities Open Book program holds publishers to a lofty standard on the technology side as well. They will need to adhere to an e-book format (EPUB 3.0.1) that includes features like searchable text and the ability to change type sizes. “You can read it on a big computer screen or a little phone,” Bobley says.
Participating publishers will retain the right to sell the same books in other formats—hard copies produced with print-on-demand technology, for example. That’s important, Willinsky says, because university presses are under pressure to develop new revenue models to sustain scholarly publishing. Support from organizations like NEH and the Mellon Foundation “should send a strong signal to the field,” Bobley says. “We hope it will spur others to look at new ways to get these great books back out there.”
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.