The foundation in May sent university press directors a request for proposals to a new grant-making initiative for long-form digital publishing for the humanities. In the e-mail, the foundation noted the growing popularity of digital scholarship, which presented an “urgent and compelling” need for university presses to publish and make digital work available to readers.

The foundation’s proposed solution is for groups of university presses to work together on testing new business models for publishing digital works, or tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of, including “(a) editing; (b) clearing rights to images and multimedia content; (c) the interaction of the publication on the Web with primary sources and other related materials; (d) production; (e) pre- and post-publication peer review; (f) marketing; (g) distribution; and (h) maintenance and preservation of digital content.”

Among other initiatives, Brown will hire editorial and technical staff to support digital publications, but will also develop guidelines that departments can use to evaluate digital scholarship in tenure and promotion cases; the University of North Carolina Press will collaborate with other university presses on the back-end activities of publishing; and researchers at West Virginia University will build a content management system to help authors and editors work with multimedia.

One will help faculty members determine how to present their research visually, while the other will serve as a digital scholarly editor, working with faculty to discover digital resources as they work on their projects.

Sherer, who came to UNC Press from the trade press, said it is “radical” that university presses — especially smaller ones — continue to try to do everything on their own.

In an added twist, the foundation required the university presses interested in the program to find a partner — such as a research library, a museum or an organization already involved in providing digital publishing services — before applying.