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Mellon grants support publishing infrastructure for digital scholarship in the humanities at U-M
ANN ARBOR—Building on last year’s $899,000 grant to build a new online publishing platform, the University of Michigan is the beneficiary of two further grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop publishing infrastructure for digital scholarship in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.
A grant of $28,000 (“Mapping the Free Ebook Supply Chain”) will use quantitative and qualitative methods to address two linked questions: How do readers discover open access academic ebooks? What kinds of metrics are most useful to publishers seeking to understand usage of these digital resources?
During the year-long project, the Free Ebook Foundation will conduct quantitative analysis of web logs and usage data from around 120 open access books published by University of Michigan Press and Open Book Publishers in Cambridge, UK. Concurrent interviews will be conducted with a range of stakeholders, including authors, readers, and representatives of information supply chain organizations.
The project will yield a published set of recommendations and an open source survey tool to embed in future open access titles.
A grant of $73,500 (“Model Contract for Digital Scholarship”), in partnership with Emory University, involves a process of iterative drafting and community consultation to develop a model author-publisher contract optimized for the publication of digital scholarship.
The model contract will be made openly available along with ancillary legal documents such as a sample permissions letter for authors to use with third-party rights holders. Emory’s scholarly communications office will lead the project, with U-M faculty and administrators participating in consultative workshops and interviews.
“An increasing number of the authors that entrust their book manuscripts to us are using digital tools extensively in their research,” says Charles Watkinson, Director of University of Michigan Press. “As one of a community of like-minded university presses, we are committed to helping these scholars maximize the impact of their work in the networked online environment. We are very grateful to the Mellon Foundation for continuing to help us make the online publishing environment a welcoming one for humanists.”
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