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Despite the steady uptick in the number of article-length publications, longform scholarship—best exemplified by the academic monograph—continues to be the dominant form of knowledge expression and dissemination in the traditional humanities disciplines (Adema, 2021). Its deep entrenchment within English, history, philosophy, languages, and social and cultural anthropology—where it is the major criteria for measuring career progression—has meant that its normative form and structure has subtly but powerfully shaped the disciplinary and methodological conventions of these fields (see Kuhn, 1962; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 2016; Eve, 2014, 112). One effect of this is that 'shortform' articles and essays, even when impactful in their own right, are still considered precursors to the longform 'book', viewed as though presented only to secure, test, or foretell its argument (see Macfarlane, 2021). Another effect is that academic careers appear as linear sequences of discrete 'book projects', flattening their ideational complexity, inter-relationality, and overlapping timelines (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998).

The principal significance of longform scholarship to arts and humanities disciplines cannot be overstated; not only does it allow, as Peter Burke illustrated in his seminal 1992 work History and Social Theory, a sustained and unserialised reflection on a bounded and well-defined subject, but it also mirrors the form and nature of humanities knowledge, which is accrued and refined over a long period of time. Burke illustrates how what we now call monographs have various pre-modern antecedents; works by Montesqieu, Justus Möser, and Fustel de Coulanges are treated as early and protean manifestations of longform studies that are monographic in scope and treatment of their subjects. It can easily be argued that this process of sustained attention upon (what is conventionally) a geographically or temporally bounded subject itself forges the subject of longform work, and that such a subject is difficult to construct in other ways.

Yet as Adema, among others, has shown, the ultimate encapsulation of longform scholarship within the printed and bound book is a result of many factors extraneous to the actual intellectual demands of the subject or of scholarly engagement with it. She explores some of these factors using the notion of 'fixity' or 'the idea of a stable, standardized, and reliable text' which emerged not only 'in connection to the medial, technological, and material affordances of the printed book' but was also 'part of the practices, institutions, and discourses that surround the printed book' (Adema, 2021, emphasis added). As such, opening longform scholarship is not about challenging in any simplistic or reactive manner the dominance of monograph-length work. Nor is it about breaking up monographs into constituent article-length pieces because they are more feasible to be published open access. It is about articulating clearly which 'practices, institutions, or discourses' call for the monograph in the first instance, and making sure that they are not auxiliary, inhibitive, or counterproductive for actual scholarly work.

Of particular importance is a set of trends that use digital media to experiment upon the outward presentation of the longform book, reducing dependence on traditional publishing models requiring extensive print-runs and library pre-subscriptions. Recent scholarship emphasizes that open longform publishing can 'reimagine' scholarly communication in HSS by challenging the closed, hierarchical workflows of legacy academic presses and instead fostering community-driven, collaborative ecosystems. The goal is to treat the monograph not as a static commodity but as, in the words of Adema, a 'living, collaborative, and iterative' scholarly endeavor (Vega, 2020). As such, achieving true openness in longform scholarship depends on supportive infrastructures and platforms. A notable example is the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, launched in 2019. COPIM was designed to remove many of the barriers to publishing open-access books by building alternatives to the highly centralized, closed systems of conventional academic publishing. The COPIM partnership itself exemplified a form of openness that fostered a more demanding relationship to academic work in terms of its actual intellectual content or form, the practice or performance of its content, and of course its accessibility. It brought together multiple universities, libraries, and nonprofit publishers (for instance the ScholarLed consortium of scholar-run presses) to collaboratively build new systems. Over 2019–2023, COPIM delivered a suite of innovations for open books: new business models and funding channels, open-source tools for production and metadata, preservation networks, and pilot projects in experimental publishing. It helped create an Open Book Collective (OBC)—a nonprofit platform for libraries to collectively fund open-access publishers, ensuring financial sustainability while preserving bibliodiversity.

Its enduring contribution was the progressive economic model that it created, called 'Opening the Future'—by which libraries subscribe to a publisher's closed backlist and, in return, the publisher releases new frontlist titles openly. The model recognised the clunky interdependencies of legacy publishing systems and took a radically progressive rather than a purist view of openness, moving away, as Sam Moore has noted in Publishing Beyond the Market (2025) from demands of compliance to the real intellectual needs of the scholars themselves. These infrastructures directly confront the economic and logistical challenges of open monograph publishing, showing that community-driven approaches can scale up and wide, centering the scholar. As Moore writes: '[t]he descriptor 'scholar-led' is important not because it connotes a specific ethics or set of values, but because it separates the term from a more general or normative understanding of terms such as 'community-led' that evoke a nonspecific grassroots quality that usually remains undefined' (2025, 100-101).

Equally important are digital platforms that enable networked, interactive forms of scholarly books. Manifold (developed by University of Minnesota Press and partners) is a leading example of an open-source platform tailored for rich, iterative monographs. Manifold allows publishers and authors to produce 'networked, iterative, media-rich, and interactive' books on the web. A Manifold publication is not a static PDF (a codec that is open only in theory) but a 'living digital work' based on open-source web protocols that can incorporate multimedia (images, audio, data), invite reader annotations, and evolve through versioning—an example of what Gary Hall and Clare Birchall term 'liquid books' (2009). The platform supports features like open or community peer review, whereby drafts of book chapters can be shared publicly for feedback before finalization. University presses have used Manifold to host works alongside print editions, fostering an engaged readership and dialogues around the text. For example, the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at Minnesota was an early adopter of Manifold; its first volume even served as a prototype for the platform, which now supports dozens of projects worldwide. By integrating annotation tools and community forums, Manifold exemplifies how infrastructure can bring openness into the process of writing and reading longform scholarship, and not just its end product.

The longform work published by the Open Humanities Press (OHP) is a remarkable testimonial for the actual academic influence of open longform scholarship. Some of the titles published by OHP have been tremendously influential in their fields; consider A History of Asking (2023) by Steven Connor, Drone Aesthetics (2024) by Beryl Pong & Michael Richardson, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014) by Joanna Zylinska, and Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (2016), a collection of articles edited by Sean Pryor and David Trotter. OHP Book series like 'New Metaphysics' (edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour), 'Data Browser' (edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa), and 'Low Latencies' (edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter) have also been tremendously generative of new scholarship, particularly in the global South where higher subscription costs mean that newer titles published by 'prestigious' University presses are more or less inaccessible. Equally influential is the role played by collaborative repositories like DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) and toolkits like the OAPEN Books Toolkit in sustaining, supporting, and making possible open infrastructures for longform publication, for the scholars as well as for the publishers.

References

Adema, J. (2021). Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. MIT Press

Adema, J., Bowie, S., and McHardy, J. (curators) (2023). The Experimental Publishing Compendium. COPIM Project. https://compendium.copim.pub/

Berkenkotter, C., and Huckin, T.N. (2016). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Routledge

Burke, P. (2005). History and Social Theory. Polity

Eve, M.P. (2014). Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. Cambridge UP

Hall, G., and Birchall, C. (2023). Liquid Books: Publishing in the Age of Data. Open Humanities Press

Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press

Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998). Scholarly Book Reviewing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: The Flow of Ideas Within and Among Disciplines. Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Macfarlane, B. (2021). 'The Neoliberal Academic: Illustrating Shifting Academic Norms in an Age of Hyper-Performativity', Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53.5, 459-468

Moore, S.A. (2025). Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons. University of Michigan Press

Vega, P.C. (2020). 'An Open Insights Interview with Janneke Adema and Gary Hall', Open Library of Humanities, 14 January 2020