Providence, R.I. [Brown University] Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP) has been invited to join the Association of University Presses, an organization of nearly 160 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, AUPresses advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds intellectual freedom, integrity, stewardship, and equity and inclusion as core values. AUPresses 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.
“We are deeply honored to join AUPresses as an Affiliate Member,” said Allison Levy, Director of BUDP. “This invitation is a testament to Brown’s unique contributions to the scholarly publishing ecosystem, from its novel university-based approach to digital content development to its constructive partnerships with member presses.”
BUDP originated in 2014 from conversations with the Mellon Foundation about the challenges of advancing the practice and recognition of long-form born-digital scholarly works. This resulted in the launch of an experimental collaboration between Brown’s Dean of the Faculty and the University Library to encourage and support Brown faculty with innovative research that could not be done full justice in traditional print book format.
“From the vantage point of today, what began as an untested organizational and academic hypothesis has succeeded to a degree that would have defied our most optimistic hopes at the start,” said Joseph S. Meisel, Joukowsky Family University Librarian. Last year, recognizing that the program had outgrown its “initiative” phase, Brown University Digital Publications was established.
To date, three born-digital works developed through BUDP have been published by leading university presses and have received major forms of recognition: Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), co-edited by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak, was awarded the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize in Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association; Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), by Massimo Riva, won the PROSE Award for best e-product by the Association of American Publishers; and A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), by Shahzad Bashir, was recently shortlisted for The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy. All of these projects have been open access publications and have enjoyed remarkable global reach to thousands of readers in a short amount of time. Thirteen other works are currently in development and represent a broad disciplinary range; of these, one is under contract with Fordham University Press.
BUDP has begun to expand its work beyond Brown’s faculty in several strategic ways. This includes a highly successful, twice-competitively funded NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities assisting 15 scholars from less-well-resourced institutions in developing their scholarly ideas for digital publication. A recently awarded grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program will establish a cross-organizational training and support program, with the HBCU Library Alliance and University of Michigan Press, for HBCU library professionals seeking to gain or expand expertise in developing open access born-digital scholarship. BUDP has also partnered with MIT Press on a new multimodal book series, “On Seeing,” to explore under-examined questions in visual culture, including an innovative community engagement component.
“We welcome Brown University Digital Publications as an Affiliate Member of our global community of nearly 160 publishers, committed to the highest caliber of research-based scholarship,” said Peter Berkery, executive director of the Association of University Presses. “Affiliate Members show a sustained commitment to scholarly publishing by performing peer review of their scholarly publications and meeting output and staffing requirements. Together, Brown University Digital Publications and all of our members pursue a shared mission of ensuring academic excellence and cultivating knowledge.”
BUDP’s membership in AUPresses will help to broaden conversation about born-digital scholarly publications. The growing interest among scholars in the possibilities of digital publication, and the growing enthusiasm of scholarly presses for well-developed scholarly content suitable for peer review have led Brown to view this work as a long-term commitment that will hopefully encourage similar developments at other institutions.
About Brown University Digital Publications
Brown University Digital Publications — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.
