NEH, Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Open Book Program to Revive Backlist Work

"As part of a wider emphasis on digital publishing and the relevance of humanities scholarship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are giving new life to out-of-print humanities books. In January the two organizations announced a new joint pilot grant program, Humanities Open Book, which will help publishers identify important out-of-print works, secure rights to them, and convert them to EPUB format ebooks freely accessible under a Creative Commons (CC) license. Awards range from $50,000 to $100,000 per recipient, and will cover a period of one to three years. Scholarly books and monographs in the humanities have a relatively short print run, and works published since 1923 are not in the public domain. While some emerging models, such as Knowledge Unlatched or the crowdfunded Unglue.it, aim to bring back out-of-print titles that are still under copyright as open access, DRM-free ebooks, the Humanities Open Book Program (HOB) calls specifically on academic presses, scholarly societies, museums, and other institutions that publish work of humanities scholarship to identify backlist items that they deem worthy of reviving ..."