ACLS Open Book Prize + Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award

ACLS welcomes submissions to its 2025 Open Access Book Prizes, funded with generous support from Arcadia.

The winning book in each category receives dual awards, announced at the 2025 ACLS Annual Meeting on April 24-26 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• 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.

Prize Details

• The completed entry form must be submitted by the publisher.
• The 2025 entry form contains a section to be completed by the author(s). To facilitate this process, see the fillable Author Response Form. Authors may not independently submit entries.
• All submissions must be peer-reviewed, open access monographs with copyright dates from 2018 to 2023.
• Submissions must be published in English. Translations are eligible as long as copyright for the original publication falls from 2018 to 2023.
• Publishers may be based anywhere in the world.
• With the exception of the winning titles, entries to last year’s competition are eligible for re-entry as long as they meet all other criteria.
• The 2025 submission categories are:
  • Environmental Humanities. Eligible works include humanistic examinations of environmental issues including but not limited to 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 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).
• Submissions will be accepted from July 18, 2024, to September 10, 2024.
• Questions? Email [email protected] to schedule a meeting.

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 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 website).

Publishers may submit entries in the following categories:

1. Environmental Humanities. Eligible works include humanistic examinations of environmental issues including but not limited to climate change, biodiversity, conservation, and environmental justice.
2. History. Eligible works include historical examinations of all eras, geographical regions, peoples, and/or cultural developments through any theoretical lens.
3. Literary Studies. Eligible works include studies of language, literature, and media from all eras, cultures, and locales through any theoretical lens.
4. Multimodal, in any humanistic discipline. Multimodal works include digital content or affordances that are not possible in a print edition. Competitive works will 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).

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).

All submissions must be published in English with copyright dates from 2018 through 2023. Translations are eligible as long as copyright for the original publication falls from 2018 to 2023.

Publishers may be based anywhere in the world.

ALL CATEGORIES. Reviewers for the prizes will evaluate all eligible book submissions with the following criteria:

• 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.

• Submissions open on July 18, 2024, and close on September 10, 2024.
• No entry fee is required.
• The entry form must be completed in one session. Before beginning, we recommend reviewing the Sample Entry Form and collecting responses from all authors for the Author Section.
• All entries must be submitted by the book’s publisher. Authors should complete the Author Section of the entry form but may not independently submit entries. To facilitate this process, see the fillable Author Response Form.
• Publishers must submit a complete entry form for each nominated title. Incomplete entry forms will be disqualified.
• Publishers or distinct imprints may submit up to three titles in each category, for a total of twelve 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.
• Consistently broken links to nominated titles are cause for immediate disqualification at any stage of the judging process.

Please send questions to [email protected].