Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) is a five-year pilot initiative to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members through open editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs. Scholars face growing difficulty in finding publishers for their monographs as academic library budgets shrink and demand for monographs falls. The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) formally launched TOME in 2017 to collaboratively address this problem.
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TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)
“TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) advances the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members through open access editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.
Scholars face growing difficulty in finding publishers for their monographs as academic library budgets shrink and demand for monographs falls. To collaboratively address this problem, the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) launched this initiative in spring 2017.
In each of the first five years, colleges and universities participating in TOME are providing at least three baseline publishing grants of $15,000 to support the publication of open access monographs. Publishers accepting these grants—for eligible books that have been approved through the usual editorial and peer-review processes—are making high-quality, platform-agnostic, digital editions freely available. These TOME-supported monographs will make new research freely available online, increasing the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opening up knowledge to more readers….”
Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative
“Implemented in March 2017, this new initiative is intended to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members by publishing open-access digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.
Participating universities and colleges have committed to three components: provide a baseline university publishing grant of $15,000 to support the publication of an open access, digital monograph of 90,000 words or less (with additional funding for works of greater length or complexity to be negotiated by the author, institution, and publisher); set a target of awarding at least three publishing grants per year; and participate in this initiative for five years.
Publishers accepting these grants, for eligible books that have been approved through the usual editorial and peer review processes, will make a high-quality, platform-agnostic, digital edition freely available….”
AAU-ARL Prospectus for an Institutionally Funded First-Book Subvention | Association of Research Libraries® | ARL®
“The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) are working together, through a Task Force on Scholarly Communication, to ensure a robust system of scholarly communication in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. The task force seeks to address the economic challenges facing scholarly monograph publishing and to exploit digital communication technologies to move the academy towards a sustainable, innovative, and open system for supporting humanistic research.
Specifically, the task force intends to address the inability of a market model to adequately support research monograph publication based primarily on scholarly merit. This prospectus describes a faculty title subvention designed to ensure the long-term economic viability of foundational scholarly monographic publishing, while promoting the emergence of innovative digital models….”