The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has introduced two prizes aimed at expanding free and open access to scholarly books in the humanities. ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award were announced at the organization's annual meeting in Philadelphia. The prizes will remove obstacles to ensure that students, instructors, librarians, and anyone in the world can access important research and information on literature, history, music, art, and other related fields. The awards are made possible by a generous grant from Arcadia.
Open access publishing brings scholarly material to all people regardless of race, gender, or class, including teachers and students who cannot afford to purchase books and do not have access to major research libraries. This is especially important as the rising costs of education and expansion of student debt have caused society to lose faith in higher education.
The ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award will be among the largest for scholarly books, with $20,000 awarded to two authors of open access monographs published between 2017 and 2022. The publishers of the winning titles will receive the Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award in the amount of $30,000 to support forthcoming books that would not otherwise be published open access.
The prizes aim to expand access to high-quality academic research books that focus on the human experience – past, present, and future – and can help democratize and improve education. Open access books are freely available online to anyone, anywhere in the world. Respondents to an ongoing survey conducted since 2020 by the University of Michigan Press report using open access books to find reliable information for their professional development, community engagement, and understanding of world events.
The prizes will help change the way we circulate scholarship, which improves our understanding of one another, builds bridges across differences, and stimulates our imaginations. In addition to expanding access to information for educational equity, open access publishing contributes to the public good by helping to combat rampant online misinformation, particularly among artificial intelligence tools. With open access publishing, large language models can more easily find carefully researched, vetted, and peer-reviewed content.
More information about the ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award is available at www.acls.org.
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