ACLS Open Book Prize + Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award

ACLS welcomes submissions to its 2026 Open Access Book Prizes, funded with generous support from Arcadia.

Prize Details

The winning book in each category will receive dual awards, presented in October 2026 during International Open Access Week.

• Authors receive the ACLS Open Access Book Prize, with a cash award of $20,000.
• Publishers receive the Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award, with a grant of $30,000 to support new open access titles.
• The 2026 submission categories are:
  • Anthropology. Eligible works include humanistic, qualitative studies across all disciplinary subfields, including archaeology and biological, cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology.
  • Environmental Humanities. Eligible works include humanistic, interdisciplinary examinations of environmental issues–such as climate change, biodiversity, conservation, and environmental justice.
  • History. Eligible works include historical examinations of all eras, geographical regions, peoples, and/or cultural developments through any theoretical lens.
  • Literary/Media Studies. Eligible works include studies of language, literature, and media from all eras, cultures, and locales through any theoretical lens.
  • Multimodal, in any humanistic discipline. Multimodal works include digital content or affordances that are not possible in a print edition. Competitive works demonstrate effective and innovative use of the online environment and must contain the entirety of the monograph’s text (i.e., not a companion website to a separate print edition).
  • Political Science. Eligible works include humanistic, qualitative studies across all disciplinary subfields, including but not limited to comparative politics, international relations, policy studies, political economy, political philosophy, political theory, politics & gender, politics & religion, public administration, and race, ethnicity & politics.

All submissions must be peer-reviewed, open access monographs.

• Monographs are defined here as long-form scholarly arguments on a single subject in the humanities or interpretative social sciences. Edited collections, anthologies, critical editions, textbooks, and creative works are not eligible for the prize.
• Open access is defined here as a digital work freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, with internet access. Eligible submissions must be:
  • published simultaneously (within one year) with any editions made available for sale in either print or e-book formats
  • free of digital rights management
  • distributed on at least two platforms (may include the publisher’s and/or author’s websites)

• Submissions in all categories must be qualitative studies grounded in humanistic research questions and methodologies.
• All submissions must be published in English with copyright dates from 2019 through 2024.
• Translations into English from other languages are eligible as long as the copyright date for the original publication falls from 2019 to 2024.
• Submissions in any category may take the form of PDF, EPUB, or browser-based publications in any platform (e.g., Fulcrum, Manifold, Pressbooks, PubPub, Quire, Scalar, WordPress, custom-built).
• Publishers and authors may be based anywhere in the world.
• Publishers or distinct imprints may submit up to three titles in each category, for a total of eighteen nominations to the competition. Publishers submitting more than these limits in any category will be disqualified from the full competition.
• The same title may be entered into multiple categories, but the limit of three titles per category, per publisher remains in force.
• Winning titles from previous years are not eligible in any category.
• Entries to previous competitions, including finalists, are eligible for re-entry as long as they meet all other criteria.
• Consistently broken links to nominated titles are cause for immediate disqualification at any stage of the judging process.

ALL CATEGORIES

Reviewers for the prizes will evaluate eligible book submissions for:

• original and compelling intellectual contribution to the field or discipline;
• demonstrable impact to the wider scholarly conversation and/or to nonacademic audiences through positive reviews, conventional or social media attention, prizes or other commendations, and/or course adoptions;
• evidence of good faith efforts by the publisher to make the work widely accessible through inclusive design and technology choices, as well as robust distribution and marketing strategies.

MULTIMODAL ONLY

In addition to the criteria listed above, multimodal submissions will also be evaluated for:

• innovative and judicious use of digital components that serve to advance the work’s core argument or narrative;
• intuitive navigation and seamless integration of text and digital content;
• attention to preservation concerns.

The completed entry form must be submitted by the publisher.

Authors may not submit entry forms independently.

• The entry form contains a section to be completed by the author(s). To facilitate the process of collecting information from authors, see the fillable Author Response Form below under Supporting Documents.
• The entry form must be completed in one session. Before beginning, we recommend reviewing the Sample Entry Form below under Supporting Documents and collecting responses from all authors.
• Publishers must submit a complete entry form for each nominated title. Incomplete entry forms will be disqualified.

Please send questions to [email protected].