Librarians

Libraries are critical to the future of scholarly book publishing. Find out more about the role that librarians play in the TOME initiative.

How It Works

TOME is a five-year pilot project that started in 2017 and runs through 2021. The original 14 participating universities committed to awarding three publishing grants per year over the five years (15 total grants). Baseline grants are $15,000 for average-length (90,000 words) monographs. Longer works, or those that contain complex elements, might require additional funding. 

Since 2017, additional institutions have joined the pilot without committing to funding 15 monographs. If your institution is considering joining TOME, please contact us. We will work with you to come up with a commitment that fits your situation. Ultimately, the goals of TOME go beyond numbers. We want to change the landscape of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social sciences by creating a broader and more equitable funding base for the high-quality scholarly publishing that sustains those disciplines.

Each institution handles the funding and administration of TOME in its own way. In some cases, the library takes the lead. In others, it may be a college or a center for the humanities. Likewise, each institution establishes its own rules for selecting TOME volumes. Some accept applications from faculty on a rolling basis throughout the year. Others employ a competitive process with a selection committee that makes decisions after set application deadlines. An institution also might decide to give priority to an author’s first book, but this is by no means a requirement. 

TOME grants are generally paid directly to the publisher but the funds are not released until after the manuscript has undergone the same procedures for peer review and met the same editorial standards as the publisher’s other scholarly books. If a monograph is ultimately accepted for publication, the publisher works with the institution to formalize the terms of the TOME grant. These terms are in addition to the regular terms that the author and the publisher agree to in the author contract. To receive funding, the publisher must commit to producing a digital open access edition of the book, openly licensing it under a Creative Commons license, and depositing the files in selected open repositories. The publisher is in turn free to publish (and sell) a traditional print edition according to terms agreed to in the author contract.