New York – September 18, 2026 -- The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has named six winners of the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards, distributing a combined $300,000 across humanities disciplines.
Six titles split $50,000 prizes each across authors and publishers
Each winning author receives a $20,000 cash award, while the corresponding publisher receives a $30,000 grant to fund immediate open access publication of at least two new books. Winners span Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, History, Literary/Media Studies, Multimodal scholarship, and Political Science categories, selected from shortlists of five finalists per category by a judging panel.
Winning publishers include University of California Press, Cornell University Press, and Amherst College Press
Prize recipients include Emily Yates-Doerr's "Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm" (University of California Press, 2024), Jesse Rodenbiker's "Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China" (Cornell University Press, 2023), and Carrie Baker's "Abortion Pills: US History and Politics" (Amherst College Press, 2024). Additional winners are Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop's "Twining" (Amherst College Press, 2021), a five-author volume on Deaf mobility studies published by Gallaudet University Press in 2024, and Naila Kabeer's "Renegotiating Patriarchy" (LSE Press, 2024).
Award ceremony set for November 4, 2026 at the New York Public Library
ACLS will present the prizes at a public event featuring a panel discussion. Sarah McKee, ACLS Program Officer for Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship, said the winning books go beyond removing paywalls by incorporating multiple file formats, alt-text, video captioning, and screen reader compatibility to reach nonspecialist audiences including students and policymakers.
ACLS marks 100 years of grantmaking to individual scholars in 2026
The prize program is backed by Arcadia, a charitable foundation that has awarded more than $1.2 billion globally since 2002 to support nature protection, cultural heritage preservation, and open access to knowledge. ACLS is a federation of 85 scholarly organizations representing American humanities and social sciences scholarship.