The University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab of Graduate Center of the City University of New York have received a $732,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for Manifold Scholarship.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Moving beyond the digitization of scholarly books, based primarily in siloed, read-only analogues to print such as Adobe Acrobat PDF and Epub, Manifold will define and create the next phase of scholarly publishing: monographs that open the boundaries of separate formats like "print" and "e-book." Foreseeing an emerging hybrid environment for scholarship, Manifold will develop, alongside the print edition of a book, an alternate form of publication that is networked and iterative, served on an interactive, open-source platform. . . .
In Manifold, a digital scholarly work would not be a static replication of the print book. From the beginning it is dynamic, revised, and expanded to reflect the evolution of academic thought and research, incorporating access to primary research documents and data, links to related archives, rich media, social media, and reading tools. Manifold seeks to encompass the growth and refinement of academic work as it is discussed, reviewed, and analyzed.