Community Message for October 2025

Every book has an audience.

Sometimes that audience is enormous. In January, according to the New York Times, the romantasy novel Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros sold a record-breaking 2.7 million copies in its first week. More than one million of those sales were for print editions.

Sometimes, the audience is a bit smaller. As humanistic scholars well know, the entire print run for an academic monograph is often in the hundreds. Most of these copies are sold to academic libraries and to individual scholars working in the same, or in a closely aligned, field. Yet the ideas, analyses, and theories presented in these books can transform disciplines, shift public discourse, influence policy, and contribute to our collective understanding of the human experience.

Scholarly monographs may never compete in sheer numbers with bestselling fantasy novels, but they do speak to readers outside academia by illuminating research relevant to their professions, family histories, personal identities, life experiences, and unique passions. The challenge is to connect with these audiences in an increasingly noisy and fragmented world of content choices.

The open access movement—celebrated by International Open Access Week every October—offers a promising pathway. It allows scholarly monographs to continue their conventional role in field building and individual career progression within the academy while also granting access to audiences outside of it. Indeed, according to one study, average download numbers for open access books are 20 times greater than print sales. This jump in readership is made possible through unfettered access to the books. Open access books are discoverable online and free to read, without purchase or subscription charges and regardless of institutional affiliation.

The digital environment that makes open access possible also presents opportunities for the continued evolution of humanistic scholarship. It allows authors to present their research in ways that print books cannot support. Scholars can include audio tracks and video clips.  Data visualizations can help to simplify and streamline dense text descriptions, and interactive maps can demonstrate complex change over time. The inclusion of more color images is possible with the elimination of strict space constraints and expensive printing charges. Even the most seemingly basic functionality of linking within and outside a publication can transform both the writing and reading experiences.

We are still in early days of experimenting with such affordances in scholarly publications, and open access currently constitutes a fraction of the total scholarly book output. The ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards were established in 2024 with support from Arcadia to raise awareness and encourage continued growth of open access publications in the humanities and social sciences. The prizes identify and reward outstanding open access scholarship across four categories: environmental humanities, history, literary studies, and multimodal. Authors of the winning titles receive $20,000, while the publishers receive grants for $30,000 to support the open access publication of at least two new books.

The authors of the winning titles have seen their books reach and resonate with audiences both within and outside academia. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, winner in the history category for Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), partnered with Guam Philharmonic Foundation to host Remembering Saigon: From Vietnam to Guam, a public history exhibit in Guam based on the book’s research. She also worked with Guam’s educators to get Archipelago of Resettlement into classrooms as a key historical resource. Readers have downloaded the book more than 4,600 times from the Luminos platform at UC Press.

Camelia Dewan, winner in the environmental humanities category for Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press, 2021) and a former development professional, “wrote this book in an accessible and introductory way” for students but also “to provide a space for my Bangladeshi colleagues and their concerns about the future of the environment and waterways in Bangladesh, so that the book and its findings could help shape policy and future development interventions.” Funded by the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and published on the Manifold platform, both supported by the Mellon Foundation, the book has been viewed and downloaded by more than 16,000 readers in at least 65 countries across platforms, including the Internet Archive, JSTOR and Project Muse.

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press, 2019), the winner in the literary studies category, stands as a powerful public tribute and memorial to its author Hannah Frank, who died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 33, one year into her job as Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Edited and shepherded to publication by Daniel Morgan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, the book has found not only academic readers, who have cited it nearly 100 times, but also has reached critics and animators, with the open access edition garnering more than 11,200 downloads on the Luminos platform.

The winner in the multimodal category, Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020), is attracting high readership by any standard, attracting more than 410,000 unique visitors and 3 million page views since its publication. For its co-authors—Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou—”open access has delivered Feral Atlas the readership we dreamed of from the start. It moved rapidly around the world and beyond English-speaking environments, unlike a traditional print book restricted by the institutions, languages, timelines, and costs of publishing.”

The winning authors and publishers will participate in a free public panel discussion at The New York Public Library on October 22. Registration is now open, and we encourage you to join us. But beyond this event, we invite you to join the growing audience for open access books. Happy reading!