UNC Press Announces First Recipients of Thomas W. Ross Fund Publishing Grants

The University of North Carolina Press has named the recipients of its first round of Thomas W. Ross Fund publishing grants. The grants are administered by the Press’s Office of Scholarly Publishing Services (OSPS), which serves the UNC system by providing access to a range of sustainable, mission-driven publishing models and solutions. The Press has successfully completed a $50,000 challenge grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust to create the $100,000 Ross Fund.

The grants will help UNC system departments, centers, and libraries publish scholarly material generated on their campuses. The five projects being funded represent a range of scholarly work being created at four different institutions.

• Winston-Salem State University will receive funding to support their Journal of Best Practices in Health Professions Diversity: Research, Education, and Policy and to create an ongoing and sustainable relationship with the Press for its publication. The journal is edited by Peggy Valentine, Dean of the School of Health Sciences.
• The Writing for the Screen and Stage minor program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use funds to offset the costs of publishing an anthology of student plays chosen for production from five years of the Long Story Shorts One Act Play Festival. Dana Coen, Director of the program, will serve as editor for the book.
• North Carolina Central University will apply funds toward its effort to launch a new journal of undergraduate research that will be available in an open-access digital edition and in a print format. The journal will be overseen by Gerrelyn C. Patterson, Associate Professor and Middle Grades Education Program Coordinator; Julie D. Nelson, Assistant Professor Department of Language and Literature; and Theodosia T. Shields, Director of Library Services at the James E. Shepard Memorial Library.
• The Hunter Library at Western Carolina University will use funding to reissue Samuel Hunnicutt’s Twenty Years of Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies, a rare item from their collection originally published in 1926 that is much sought after by scholars and general readers alike. Liz Skene, Special and Digital Collections Librarian, will lead the project.
• The Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use a grant to help fund a major project to reissue more than 250 out-of-print monographs from the North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures series in new print and digital editions. The series is edited by Frank Dominguez, Professor of Spanish.

“We are very excited about the quality and diversity of these initial projects,” said John McLeod, Director of the OSPS. “We are looking forward to working with faculty and staff to help these five initiatives get off the ground, and we couldn’t be happier to have this funding available to help in the effort.”

“Changes in technology are creating new opportunities for universities to publish and make research widely accessible. We’re very pleased to see this cutting-edge collaboration within the university system,” said Junius Gonzales, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina.

The OSPS will be offering grants quarterly through the remainder of the academic year. The next deadline for applications is November 15, 2016. Spring 2017 deadlines are February 15 and May 15. UNC system faculty or staff interested in learning more should visit http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/897 for information.