The Council on Library and Information Resources and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education will launch Anvil Academic, a "digital publisher for the humanities," in late 2012.
Here's an excerpt from the press release :
Anvil will focus on publishing new forms of scholarship that cannot be adequately conveyed in the traditional monograph.
"Increasingly, research in the humanities is dependent on large data sets and involves sophisticated algorithms and visualizations in the execution of that research and in the construction of the products of scholarship. Anvil will capture the environment in which this research is conducted: a linked ecology of scholarly expression, data, and tools of analysis that will over time become itself a place for new knowledge discovery," said CLIR President Chuck Henry.
Works published through Anvil will be available through Creative Commons licenses on the Web and as apps on portable devices. The title production system will be developed jointly by NITLE and CLIR for use by other institutions, each of which would have the opportunity to publish under its own imprint. . . .
"An important part of the Anvil experiment will be developing and testing new revenue models," said NITLE Executive Director Joey King. "Our current models, which rely heavily on institutional subsidies, author subventions, and revenue from sales of printed books, are not proving to be sustainable. With Anvil, we intend to explore alternative paths to sustainability as rigorously as we explore new publishing models."
The program received startup funding from the Brown Foundation, Inc., in Houston, Texas. Stanford University, the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, Bryn Mawr College, Amherst College, Middlebury College, and Southwestern University will also provide funds and staffing. Anvil Academic Publishing will work closely with innovative programs developed by the University of Michigan, especially MPublishing, and draw on Johns Hopkins University's exemplary experience with digital humanities project development.
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