Call for Submissions
ACLS Open Book Prize + Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award
Deadline: Submissions open July 5, 2023, and close September 1, 2023
ACLS welcomes submissions to its inaugural open access book prizes, funded by Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Each winning book will receive dual awards, presented to the authors and publishers in May 2024 at the ACLS Annual Meeting.
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
All entries must be submitted by the publisher. Authors may not independently submit entries.
Publishers may submit entries in two categories, for open access monographs published from 2017 to 2022:
History. Eligible works include historical examinations of all eras, geographical regions, peoples, and/or cultural developments through any theoretical lens.
Multimodal, born-digital works. Works that demonstrate effective and innovative use of the online environment in any humanistic discipline are eligible. The multimodal work must contain the entirety of the monograph’s text and function as a standalone edition (i.e., not as a companion website to a separate print edition).
Submissions will be accepted from July 5, 2023, to September 1, 2023.
Applicant support including webinars and office hours will be held throughout the submission period. Sign up for more information.
Eligibility
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 two categories, for monographs published from 2017 through 2022.
History. Eligible works include historical examinations of all eras, geographical regions, peoples, or cultural developments through any theoretical lens.
Multimodal, born-digital works. Eligible works—in any humanistic discipline—will demonstrate effective and innovative use of the online environment. The multimodal work must contain the entirety of the book’s text and function as a standalone edition (i.e., not as a companion website to a separate print edition).
Submissions in either 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 2017 through 2022.
Evaluation Criteria
Reviewers for the prizes will evaluate eligible book submissions with the following criteria.
For both categories:
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
Evidence of good faith efforts by the publisher to make the work widely accessible through inclusive design and technology choices, as well as novel distribution and marketing strategies
For multimodal category only:
Innovative and judicious use of digital affordances that serve to advance the work’s core argument or narrative
Intuitive navigation and seamless integration of text and media components
Attention to preservation concerns
Application Guidelines
Submissions open on July 5, 2023, and close on September 1, 2023.
No entry fee is required.
All entries must be submitted by the book’s publisher. Authors may not independently submit entries.
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 six nominations.
Publishers submitting more than these limits will be disqualified from the competition.
The same title may be entered into both 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.
See SAMPLE entry form. The official entry form will be available on July 5.
Contact
Please send questions to OAbookprizes@acls.org.
Supporting Documents
SAMPLE_OA Book Prize Entry Form