With the closure of the digital publishing initiative at Stanford University Press, we have reached an inflection point in the development of digital publishing platforms and programs. Of growing strength is Brown University Digital Publications with workshops for authors to support the development of digital projects that push beyond the affordances of the book, whether print or digital. The platforms for digital monographs such as Manifold are coming into their own, and an increasing number of scholars are creating unique digital and multimodal works for evaluation within the academic systems of tenure and promotion, making digital monographs a growing part of the scholarly publishing conversation. Where we have been and where we are going are key questions as we look toward the future of not just digital history, but History and its modes of scholarly contributions.

This roundtable will bring together leaders in the digital publishing space - funders, academic units, publishers, and authors of digital monographs - to discuss the current state of the field of publishing for digital monographs. Patricia Hswe, Program Officer, Mellon Foundation, will speak to the funding models and Mellon’s approach to supporting digital monographs, platforms, and initiatives. Allison Levy, Director, Brown Univeristy Digital Publishing, will speak to the work of supporting authors in the development of digital projects. Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press, will speak to the Press experience with publishing digital projects and the lessons learned from the Stanford Digital Projects initiative. Finally, Lincoln Mullen, Associate Professor at George Mason Univeristy and author of America’s Public Bible: A Commentary, will speak to the author experience in creating a digital monograph. Led by co-chairs, Lauren Tilton, Associate Professor, University of Richmond and author of Layered Lives, and Jeri E. Wieringa, incoming Assistant Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, the group will tackle a series of questions, including how the various platforms and approaches support and utilize the multimodal affordances of digital spaces, how digital publishing intersects with questions of open access and open scholarship, and how different scholars and presses are tackling questions of non-monograph scholarship, including data sets, code, and visual arguments. In addition, we will discuss issues of archiving and preservation, and the long term sustainability and costs of the digital publishing ecosystem.