Duke ScholarWorks » Duke Open Monograph Award

March 1, 2024 – All open monograph grants based on the 5-year TOME pilot at Duke have now been awarded! We are not accepting new applications at this time.

Many academic monographs achieve limited distribution–a print run of only a few hundred copies, and electronic access (if available at all) locked away behind a paywall. We believe the potential audience for Duke scholarship is much greater. The Duke Open Monograph Award aims to meet that potential by making your work available to the widest possible audience of readers.

The Duke Open Monograph Award is a five-year pilot funded by the Duke University Libraries to facilitate greater access to Duke faculty scholarship through open access publishing. The award will provide $15,000 per academic monograph—paid to a participating university press publisher on the author’s behalf—to make a digital copy of the monograph available free of charge on the open web under a Creative Commons license through sites such as the Directory of Open Access Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, JSTOR’s Open Content, MuseOpen, and OAPEN Library.

The Duke Open Monograph Award is a part of a collaborative project developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of University Presses (AUP) called Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), which is an effort to make more scholarly monographs openly available on a broad scale. Duke is one of twenty participating colleges and universities, all committed to opening access to scholarly books published by their faculty. Monographs funded under this award will pass through the same rigorous peer-review and professional editing process as any other monograph published by the specified publisher but will be made openly available online as well as through traditional distribution channels.

Eligibility

Awards are available to current full-time members of the Duke faculty. Tenure-track and tenured faculty, as well as non-tenure-track faculty with long-term appointments, are eligible to apply.
Monographs eligible for funding are new monographs, not previously published, that are generally aimed at a scholarly audience using in-depth research methods. Monographs can be aimed at a broader readership, but must adhere to academic standards of research and citation. This fund does not cover critical editions, edited anthologies, creative works, textbooks, or translations of previously published works.
Over sixty of the world’s leading university presses are participating in the TOME initiative. The Association of University Presses has a complete list of participating publishers. Duke will accept applications for monographs published by presses listed by AUP as participating in TOME.
Authors at Duke Kunshan University are not eligible for funding at this time.

How do I apply for funding?

Applications will be accepted starting July 1, 2018 and will be awarded on a rolling basis. Duke University Libraries has committed to funding up to three Duke-faculty authored books (at $15,000 per book) per year. Applicants must submit [the form is now closed], which requires an executive summary of the content of your monograph and your goals for making your monograph openly available online (approximately 300-500 words). Applicants must also submit a letter of support from the chair of your department (or your school’s equivalent) as well as a letter of interest from your publisher, on the publisher’s letterhead. We strongly encourage authors to contact Duke’s Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship, Haley Walton (haley.walton@duke.edu), to discuss your application before you apply.