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AAUP to Develop Digital Monograph P+L Builder

Mellon Foundation Grant Supports Development of Essential Tool for Scholarly Monograph Publishing

New York, NY— The Association of American University Presses is pleased to announce the receipt of a $50,200 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of a tool to capture and project the costs of publishing digital scholarly monographs.

The AAUP Digital Monograph P+L Tool will be based on the methodology and cost definitions used in the February 2016 ITHAKA S+R study, “The Costs of Publishing Scholarly Monographs.” The lead researchers of that study, Nancy Maron and Kimberly Schmelzinger, will streamline the data collection procedures, develop a way to project funding and revenue from a variety of possible new sources and business models, and provide guidelines, instructions, and visualizations for publishers to make the most of this new tool.

The toolset will be made available freely online by the AAUP to serve the wider mission-driven publishing community. Developers will present the tool in beta at the AAUP Financial Officers Meeting in Seattle, WA, in April 2016 and introduce the final tool at AAUP 2016 in Philadelphia this June. A series of webinars will be offered to guide users through the tool.

“The drive to open humanities and social sciences monographs puts pressure on publishers, libraries, funders, and universities to truly understand the full costs of publishing these works at a high-quality, and to attempt to project the effects of new funding and distribution models,” said Peter Berkery, AAUP Executive Director. “It is our hope that this tool will be of use to the entire academy in designing sustainable solutions to making long-form scholarship more broadly available.”

ABOUT AAUP

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) is an organization of nearly 140 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, AAUP advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom as core values. AAUP members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing. 

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