Forging New Traditions

for scholarly publishing in the digital age.

Time-honored. Timely.


Welcome to Anvil Academic, a pioneering, exclusively digital scholarly publisher. We bring the analog publishing world’s traditional editorial rigor to the emerging world of digitally mediated humanities scholarship.

In the electronically networked world of contemporary scholarship, the traditional role of the publisher as gatekeeper and paid distributor of scholarly argument is no longer tenable. Yet the editorial services a publisher provides to authors and the filtering and paper writing service it provides to readers and promotion-and-tenure committees are more important in the Internet age than ever before. Scholarship cannot advance properly in the digitally mediated academy unless the role of publisher can be reinvented. This reinvention calls for new forms of publication, financial models, editorial skills, and peer review—all critical parts of the Anvil experiment.

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News & Updates

Discommoded by the Archive

Our just-concluded stint as guest editors of Archive Journal’s new issue, entitled “Publishing the Archive,” has proven sobering and instructive, to say the least. Every piece in the issue calls attention to the daunting (and possibly insurmountable) challenges in the digital age of preserving archival materials in an ephemeral medium. Particularly enlightening in this regard…

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The New Digital Divide

When we launched Anvil Academic in 2012, two core convictions underlay our strategic vision. One was a belief that building our own publishing platform was folly. We believed that platform development is a multimillion-dollar endeavor that is unduly limiting, time-consuming,  and costly to authors who would have to rework projects composed on other platforms. We…

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Beyond Antagonism: At the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable

Last week I had a chance to discuss publishing, digital humanities, and sustainability models with a group from the National Federation for Advanced Information Systems (NFAIS). The meeting, NFAIS’s Humanities Roundtable, included representatives from several scholarly societies, library vendors, and academic libraries. It was an interesting cross-section (and intersection) of fields and trades, but what…

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Our Sponsors

Anvil Academic is supported by the Brown Foundation, Inc.