Open access (OA) monographs make new research freely available online. Increasing the presence of humanities and social science (HSS) scholarship on the web, this will open up such work to more readers.
Publishing costs are met by university-funded grants and other revenue sources. These publication grants enable open access to scholarship and send a strong signal to humanities and social sciences faculties that universities value and wish to promote their scholarship.
The expanded dissemination of scholarship within and beyond the academy advances the core mission of universities to create and transmit new knowledge for public benefit.
This initiative can enable new digital affordances for these publications, such as the integration of multimedia with text and the application of annotation and commenting tools, and can encourage the development of innovative forms of digital scholarship.