The digital in digital scholarship is a far-ranging term: it’s a means of connecting authors, a medium for design, an object of study, and a method of access and use. Being a “digital publisher” means more than just publishing to the web. It means being a connector, providing output guidelines, ensuring quality, and offering durable access.
Anvil Academic is a scholarly publisher of born-digital and born-again-digital research in the humanities. We have two key goals: to support complex forms of scholarly argument in a digital context and to bring editorial and institutional legitimacy to this scholarship. In other words, we are helping to make digital scholarship and helping to make this scholarship count.
One of the most pressing challenges to producing digital scholarship is that it has yet to achieve the same institutional clout as print analogs like the journal article or scholarly monograph. Our chief aim is to provide peer and editorial review to pre-existing and in-development digital products. The imprimatur of a high-caliber editorial board is one clear way to signal the legitimacy digital scholars need to advance their careers. Our editorial board and the network of peer reviewers we’re constructing based on editorial-board input is and will continue to be Anvil’s key strength.
But we are committed to ensuring that review and imprimatur aren’t simply terminal points on the production timeline. Scholarly products are more than just lines on a curriculum vitae; they need and deserve an expansive readership. We are exploring alternative impact metrics and offering usage reporting to help authors (and review committees) see how their scholarship is reaching readers and being used within the disciplinary community and beyond.
Anvil is also committed to being the guarantor of a project’s longevity. To do this, we actively collaborate with authors’ home institutions and Anvil partner institutions to seek stable hosting. We are also partnering with Internet Archive’s Archive-It service to further ensure that Anvil publications are carefully and consistently preserved.
Finally, we are pursuing networked solutions to our own sustainability. By offering review, metrics, and preservation services that meet both author and institutional needs, we hope to demonstrate value that is worth supporting beyond our initial grant funding.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
- Charles Henry, President, CLIR, and Co-Chair
- W. Joseph King, Distinguished Fellow, NITLE, and Co-Chair
- Marguerite Avery, Senior Acquisitions Editor, The MIT Press
- Edward Ayers, President, University of Richmond
- Sam Black, Attorney, Washington, D.C.
- Gregory R. Crane, Editor in Chief, Perseus, Tufts University
- Rachel Frick, CLIR Director, Digital Library Federation Program
- Geneva Henry, University Librarian, Vice Provost for Libraries, George Washington University
- Michael Keller, University Librarian, Publisher, Highwire, Stanford University
- Shana Kimball, Business Development Manager, New York Public Library
- Stephen G. Nichols, James M. Beall Professor of French and Humanities Emeritus, and Research Professor, Department of German and Romance Languages, Johns Hopkins University
- Michael Roy, L. Douglas and Laura J. Meredith Dean of Library and Information Services, and Chief Information Officer, Middlebury College
- Susan Schreibman, Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Trinity College Dublin
- Elliott Shore, Executive Director, Association of Research Libraries
- Andrew Stauffer, Director, NINES, Department of English, University of Virginia
EDITORIAL BOARD
- Jerome McGann, The John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia
- John Unsworth, Vice Provost for Library and Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, Brandeis University
- Will Thomas, John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History, University of Nebraska
- Dan Cohen, Executive Director, Digital Public Library of America
- Tara McPherson, Chair, Critical Studies, USC School of Cinematic Arts
- Julia Flanders, Director, Women Writers Project, Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library
- Stéfan Sinclair, Professor, Digital Humanities, McGill University
- Timothy Stinson, Assistant Professor of English, North Carolina State University
- Alan Liu, Professor, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
- Adeline Koh, Assistant Professor of Literature, Director of DH@Stockton, the digital humanities center at Richard Stockton College
- Brian Woodtree, Head of Writers at Essay Tigers, leading paper writing service
- Chris Francese, Professor of Classical Studies, Dickinson College
- Lauren Coats, Assistant Professor of English, Louisiana State University