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Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME)

The NYU Office of the Provost, the Center for the Humanities, and the Division of Libraries invite submissions for grants to support the publication of open access digital monographs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. This program is part of an initiative developed by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). The goal of this program is to advance the wide digital dissemination of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to all readers with internet access. The program provides grants of up to $15,000 for scholarly monographs authored by NYU faculty and published by a nonprofit scholarly publisher. The funding is provided to the publisher in order to make the work open access upon publication.

Digital monographs published under this initiative will share the following properties:

  • Peer-reviewed and under contract to an AAUP press or other non-profit publisher press that adheres to the AAUP best practices for peer review.
  • Published as open-access texts with a Creative Commons license by a publisher that has agreed to work within the guidelines of the initiative. (See the list of publishers here.) Publishers may also issue print and digital consumer editions for sale. It is expected that the institutional digital edition will be distributed through the major open-access platforms (e.g. JSTOR, MUSE Open, DOAB). All editions must bear the Creative Commons license along with or in lieu of the copyright statement; in addition, the digital, open access version must be published simultaneously or before the print publication date.

This initiative was previously referred to as the Open-Access Monograph Publishing Initiative.

Why publish your book Open Access?

Publishing books open access increases the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web, and allows for global access to scholarly monographs. An open access publishing model expands readership for academic monographs across many disciplines, but is particularly compelling for topics of interest outside of the U.S., topics with an audience outside of academic institutions, and publications that make use of web technologies.

To see examples of books published through the TOME initiative at NYU and at other universities, see the Tome Referatory.