From: Michael Carroll <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:19:44 -0500

Of possible interest.

PRESS RELEASE

MEDIA CONTACT
Paula Wasley : 202-606-8424

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books

New joint NEH/Mellon grant program to republish out-of-print
humanities books under Creative Commons license

WASHINGTON (January 15, 2015) — A new joint grant program by the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation seeks to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print
books in the humanities by turning them into freely accessible
e-books.

Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been
published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on
history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and
philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently
out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the
public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock”
these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that
anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or
mobile phones at no charge.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation are the two largest funders of humanities research
in the United States. Working together, NEH and Mellon will give
grants to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all
appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a
Creative Commons license.

The new Humanities Open Book grant program is part of the National
Endowment for the Humanities’ agency-wide initiative The Common Good:
The Humanities in the Public Square, which seeks to demonstrate and
enhance the role and significance of the humanities and humanities
scholarship in public life.

“The large number of valuable scholarly books in the humanities that
have fallen out of print in recent decades represents a huge untapped
resource,” said NEH Chairman William Adams. “By placing these works
into the hands of the public we hope that the Humanities Open Book
program will widen access to the important ideas and information they
contain and inspire readers, teachers and students to use these books
in exciting new ways.”

“Scholars in the humanities are making increasing use of digital media
to access evidence, produce new scholarship, and reach audiences that
increasingly rely on such media for information to understand and
interpret the world in which they live,” said Earl Lewis, President of
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is
delighted to join NEH in helping university presses give new digital
life to enduring works of scholarship that are presently unavailable
to new generations of students, scholars, and general readers.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation will jointly provide $1 million to convert out-of-print
books into EPUB e-books with a Creative Commons (CC) license, ensuring
that the books are freely downloadable with searchable texts and in
formats that are compatible with any e-reading device. Books proposed
under the Humanities Open Book program must be of demonstrable
intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.

Application guidelines and a list of F.A.Q’s for the Humanities Open
Book program are available online at www.NEH.gov. The application
deadline for the first cycle of Humanities Open Book grants is June
10, 2015.

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National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an
independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities
supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and
other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed
proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the
National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is
available at: www.neh.gov.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and,
where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the
arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and
democratic societies.  To this end, it supports exemplary institutions
of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an
invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.  Additional
information is available at: http://www.mellon.org/

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