ACLS Open Book Prize + Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award

Categories

• Publishers may submit entries in the following categories:
  • 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 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).

Prize Information

• 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.

Eligibility Criteria

• 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).

Evaluation Criteria

• 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.

For more information, visit ACLS.