According to today's story in "Inside Higher Education"
(http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/18/documents), NEH has revised its
scholarly editions proposal guidelines to give preference to freely
available online works. The article reports lamentations from scholars
concerned about waning peer review and the absence of viable business models
to support university presses; nevertheless, the new thrust would appear to
support the spirit of the recommendations from the recent ACLS
Cyberinfrastructure report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth"
(http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls.ci.report.pdf). While there
may be problems with the hurried way in which the new NEH guidelines were
promulgated, this should fuel wider discussion in the humanities about how
to adopt more open and flexible digital publishing models.

Martha Brogan
(203) 389-4355
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