The Scholarly Communications Program

As part of the Mellon Foundation’s support for higher education, the Scholarly Communications program focuses broadly on all stages in the life cycle of scholarly resources.  The program complements fellowships and other kinds of support for research and teaching at research universities, liberal arts colleges, independent research centers, libraries, and museums by promoting the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies broadly defined.

Grantmaking occurs principally in five main categories:  new methods of creating scholarly resources, innovations in scholarly publication, cataloging and other forms of access, preservation, and research and evaluation.  The Foundation is especially interested in developments that:

• Use forms of scholarly communications to stimulate collaborations among scholars and scholarly institutions in ways that substantially advance knowledge;
• Foster the means economically to sustain forms of scholarly communication; and 
• Apply technology to forms of scholarly communications in order to improve quality, lower costs, speed up work, open new perspectives, or make work possible that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Because the Foundation is rarely able to respond positively to unsolicited requests, prospective applicants for support in the Scholarly Communications program are encouraged to explore their ideas informally with program staff in a short email describing the project and budget before submitting formal proposals.  Letters of inquiry regarding ideas that fall within the program described above are welcome and reviewed throughout the year. 

Please direct all inquiries to:

Before writing, please review the general Foundation requirements on grant proposals in the Grant Inquiries section of the main Mellon Foundation website.  Also, please note that the Scholarly Communications program does not fund conferences, and grants within the program do not cover overhead or indirect costs, or student tuition.