Honored as Advocate for University Press and Humanities Publishing
New York, NY, and Washington, DC—Open access advocate Martin Paul Eve is the recipient of this year’s Stand UP Award from the Association of University Presses (AUPresses). Jane Bunker, 2023-2024 president of the Association and director of the Cornell University Press, made the announcement yesterday at the AUPresses 2024 Annual Meeting in Montréal, Quebec.
The Stand UP Award honors those who through their words and actions have done extraordinary work to support, defend, and celebrate the university press community. The award is intended to recognize advocates who stand up from within the communities that presses work with, speak to, and serve.
For the past decade, Eve has been a key advocate for long-form humanities scholarship in open access policy conversations which often have been driven by STEM journal articles. “His 2014 Cambridge University Press book Open Access in the Humanities remains the critical source for understanding how the humanities differ from the sciences in this space,” noted AUPresses executive director Peter Berkery. “He has focused on nudging policy makers to recognize the labor of publishing in an environment where many firebrands are dismissive.”
“From the earliest stages of his career, Martin Eve has supported – and constructively challenged – university presses as part of a sustained commitment to equitable open access for the humanities,” observed AUPresses president-elect Anthony Cond, who directs Liverpool University Press. “His work has helped to plot a way forward and to establish tools which we use to support OA, such as Opening the Future,” a collective library subscription model currently used by Liverpool University Press and Central European University Press.
Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and Principal R&D Developer at Crossref, working to make books and other research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. He is the author most recently of Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (Stanford University Press, 2024) and The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Eve has appeared before the UK House of Commons Select Committee Business, Innovation, and Skills Inquiry into Open Access, was named one of the Guardian’s five finalists for most inspiring higher education leader in 2017, and was awarded the KU Leuven Medal of Honour in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018. In 2021, he was named by the Shaw Trust as one of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK. A cofounder of the Open Library of the Humanities, he has also served on the OAPEN-UK project steering group, the Jisc Scholarly Communications Advisory Group, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Access Steering Group, and the Universities UK OA Monographs Working Group.
Eve was unable to attend the AUPresses Montréal meeting; the award will be presented to him at future date. Read more about the Stand UP Award and past winners here.