Researchers, university press directors emboldened by Mellon foundation interest in academic publishing @insidehighered

"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is aggressively funding efforts to support new forms of academic publishing, which researchers say could further legitimize digital scholarship. The foundation in May sent university press directors a request for proposals to a new grant-making initiative for long-form digital publishing for the humanities. In the e-mail, the foundation noted the growing popularity of digital scholarship, which presented an “urgent and compelling” need for university presses to publish and make digital work available to readers. But the foundation quickly contrasted those opportunities with the economic realities facing many university presses. 'These declines have made it challenging to find the resources that are needed to experiment with new digital work flows and publication models, and to create the business models and the marketing and discoverability strategies that are essential if electronic publication is to become sustainable and support scholarship in the 21st century,' the e-mail reads. The foundation’s proposed solution is for groups of university presses to work together on testing new business models for publishing digital works, or tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of ..."