For Publishers
Yes! We welcome open access monographs in either category (history or multimodal) that were published in English between 2017 and 2022.
We understand that digital publications are typically very collaborative in nature. While monographs are often single-authored works, multimodal digital projects often feature a variety of content types and contributors.
For both competition categories, the monograph is defined as a long-form scholarly argument on a single subject in the humanities or interpretative social sciences. The argument should offer a unique contribution to the field and be clearly articulated by the author(s).
Media types other than text (e.g., images, audiovisual resources, data visualizations) in a multimodal monograph should contribute directly to the work’s single, sustained argument. Edited collections, in which contributors present a variety of arguments around a single theme, are not considered monographs. Neither are scholarly editions, in which one or more authors offer commentary/analysis on an original source text. Digital media or archival collections presented without an explicit long-form argument are not considered monographs for the purposes of this competition.
Born-digital monographs are pushing the boundaries of what a monograph can be. We will continue to refine our expectations for the multimodal category in subsequent years of the competition.
The questions in the Access and Accessibility section of the application are intentionally open ended, including the one about metrics. We understand that publishers have differing levels of access to tools that provide metrics, and that these tools have likely changed over time. We encourage you to provide numbers if they are readily available, but we also welcome qualitative data that help us to better understand the publication’s reach.
For Authors
No. Publishers must submit all entries. But we encourage you to contact your editor about the possibility of entering the competition if you published an eligible open access monograph between 2017 and 2022.
All open access books are digital, and most take the form of a conventional e-book.
The distinction is that open access books are available to readers completely free of charge. An e-book that is only available for purchase or through a subscription is not open access.