Welcome to Author Query

Welcome to the first issue of Author Query: Exploring Accessible, Equitable, and Innovative Publishing. Produced by the ACLS Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship initiative, this quarterly newsletter expands the former newsletter dedicated to the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes.

Author Query offers curious scholars a window into the rapidly evolving world of scholarly publishing and encourages informed dialogue among authors, publishers, and librarians about the direction of these changes. Each issue will offer updates on the activities and outcomes of efforts within Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship, including the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and the Path to Open Community Advisory Committee. We’ll also invite guest writers to share new perspectives and developments relevant to publishing in the humanities and social sciences, always with an eye toward supporting authors navigating this often-challenging landscape.

Subscribers to the original newsletter on the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes have likely been following developments for the 2024 and 2025 competition cycles. (And if not, be sure to follow our page on LinkedIn!) This three-year pilot, supported by Arcadia, aims to attract the attention of scholars writing books in the humanities and interpretive social sciences and to raise the prestige of open access publishing. The inaugural competition garnered a total of 112 submissions in two categories—89 in History and 23 in Multimodal—from 46 publishers based in nine countries. The majority of publishers were university presses, but we also received entries from commercial, scholar-led, library, and society presses. For the 2025 competition we have introduced two new categories—Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies. Stay tuned for the announcement of the finalists and winners later this year and learn more in this issue about the experiences of the 2024 prize winners.

This issue also offers a history of the Path to Open initiative, a new funding model for open access monographs. Launched in 2022 by JSTOR in partnership with ACLS, the University of Michigan Press, and the University of North Carolina Press, this pilot aims to make one thousand scholarly books—across humanistic disciplines and from a diverse group of university presses—freely available to readers beginning in 2026. ACLS supports this initiative by administering the Path to Open Community Advisory Committee. The committee convenes participating libraries, publishers, and scholar communities to guide the development of Path to Open as a model that centers bibliodiversity, equity, sustainability, and transparency.

We also introduce you to the occasional web series Adventures in Digital Publishing, which showcases and explores enhanced and interactive digital books that have been published by university presses. The series invites authors and their publishing teams to tell the stories behind the development and release of groundbreaking humanistic books that expand the possibilities for sharing arguments and research far beyond the printed book.

Thank you for joining this community! We look forward to fostering new conversations about global efforts to make scholarly publishing more accessible, innovative, and open.

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