Diversity & Dissent Fund

Reveal Digital’s first multi-year OA fund, Diversity & Dissent, is a publishing program through which libraries and archives pool funding and primary source materials to create important Open Access digital collections and make them freely available to everyone.

Project selection and development

Working with suggestions from participating libraries and the Fund’s editorial board, we work collaboratively to identify new collections that align with the Fund’s theme and for which there is a broad teaching, learning, and research need for the content.

Once a new collection is defined and approved by the board, Reveal Digital staff identifies content for inclusion, pursues sourcing agreements with the holding institutions, and where required, seeks copyright permission agreements from rights holders. Funding libraries are eligible to nominate content from their own holdings if they are not specifically targeted for inclusion. The resulting collections reflect a broad diversity of perspectives with content drawn from many libraries and archives.

Reveal Digital develops detailed cost models for every new project. The cost model establishes a budget for all project costs, including sourcing, rights clearance, conversion, hosting, and digital preservation. The editorial board meets periodically to track progress and resolve issues.

Each project has a common set of conversion standards, ensuring that all the digital collections produced by Reveal Digital will be cross-searchable and accessible for data mining. Reveal Digital collections are hosted on the JSTOR platform, where they are cross-searchable with other relevant scholarly content and discoverable by scholars, faculty, and students worldwide.

Projected fund value and expenses

Four collections will be developed through the Diversity & Dissent fund by December 2022. We establish a budget for each project, based on the contributions and future commitments from libraries. Project budgets may be expanded to digitize more material as additional funding commitments are made. See the project description pages for each project for specific details.

Funding tiers

For the initial five-year funding period, participating libraries are asked to make non-binding commitments for annual contributions at levels tiered depending on library type.

Libraries that make a funding commitment at or above the suggested level will be Sustaining Members, while libraries that support Open Access publishing below the suggested levels will be Contributing Members.

Library type	Suggested yearly contribution
Academic (based on Carnegie Classification)
2-year colleges and special colleges	$2,400
Bachelors and other Masters (M2 + M3)	$3,600
Large Masters and other doctorate (M1 + R3)	$4,800
Doctoral: higher research (R2)	$7,200
Doctoral: highest research (R1)	$9,600
Public (population served)
Less than 50,000	$600
50,000-100,000	$1,200
100,000-500,000	$2,400
500,000-1,000,000	$3,600
More than 1,000,000	$7,200

Editorial board

Reveal Digital’s editorial board is composed of representatives from funding libraries, with members serving one or two year terms. The board plays a pivotal role in the selection of new digital projects and provides oversight as each selected project is developed.

Current members

Jessica Ballard, Archivist for Multicultural Collections & Services, University of Illinois

Conor Casey, Labor Archivist, Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries

Lillian Castillo-Speed, Head of Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley

Thai Jones, Curator, U.S. History, Columbia University

Nick Okrent, Coordinator for Humanities Collections, University of Pennsylvania

Michael Rodriguez, Coordinator for Digital Humanities, Michigan State University

Karla Strand, Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian, University of Wisconsin

Anne Ray, Senior Editor, Reveal Digital

Katrina Windon, Accessioning and Processing Archivist, University of Arkansas

Former board members who helped shape our publishing program

Lori Birrell, Associate Dean for Special Collections, University of Arkansas

Jeff Moyer, Founder, Reveal Digital