Understanding the Needs of Scholars in a Contemporary Publishing Environment

“Understanding the Needs of Scholars in a Contemporary Publishing Environment,” better know as Publishing Without Walls (PWW), is a digital scholarly publishing initiative that is scholar-driven, openly accessible, scalable, and sustainable. PWW will directly engage with scholars throughout the research process. It aims to build publishing models that can be supported locally by a university’s library, while also opening new avenues toward publication through university presses and other publishers. PWW is here to help scholars navigate the new opportunities presented by collaborative, multimodal, and interim phase works. PWW is launching two new series: one focusing on the outcomes of the Humanities Without Walls Global Midwest initiative and another concentrating on African American Studies with targeted outreach to scholars from HBCUs and memory institutions specializing in African American history and culture. We encourage interested scholars to consult with our project team on potential publications with PWW. PWW is especially seeking innovative digital publication projects, including enriched scholarly editions, annotated/mediated archival collections, thematic scholarly research collections, data visualizations, special editions of journals, and multi-authored multimedia texts, among others. The University of Illinois Library is leading the PWW initiative in partnership with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the African American Studies Department. This project is generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.