The Sustainable History Monograph Project (SMPH) was a three year (2018-2020) Mellon-funded initiative to publish open, digital editions of books about history from twenty-two university presses. While no longer “new”, the pilot from Longleaf Press, a University of North Carolina Press subsidiary, distinguished itself from other open access monograph programs, such as TOME and Knowledge Unlatched which explored different funding models, by focusing on a single discipline and optimizing digital technologies throughout the publication workflow. The pilot, which published about 60 open access books across 5 platforms (Internet Archive, OAPEN, ProjectMuse, Books at JSTOR and EBSCO), yielded lessons on funding, workflows and analytics which certainly informed subsequent models from MIT Press (Direct to Open), University of Michigan Press (Fund to Mission) and JSTOR (Path to Open), among others. What remains unique to SMPH is its focus on books about history, and as such titles in the collection provide a window on attributes of open digital editions – including open licenses that enable reuse, persistent identifiers for book and author, funder and publisher identification, metrics, etc. – as they pertain to historical subject matter. Analytics show increased use of collection titles over time and across the globe. What we don’t know is how author attitudes about publishing an open digital edition may have evolved, and that would be an interesting insight into the culture of the discipline.
