Humanists writing on German topics are gaining a fresh channel for their scholarship through a new sustainable publishing venture based at Cornell.

Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought -- an English-language book series covering literature, culture, criticism and intellectual history of the German-speaking world -- will be published in electronic form and as trade-quality books in short print runs backed up by print-on-demand. The full text of many titles will be available online for free.

A $50,000, three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help fund the innovative cross-campus endeavor, which involves Cornell Library, Cornell University Press and faculty in the Departments of German Studies, History, Music and Philosophy.

"This collaboration among multiple campus entities recognizes the importance and impact of creating space for a discipline that is vitally important to the humanities at large, but also under pressure because of declining monograph sales," said Anne Kenney, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian.

Scholars working on languages and literatures other than English have seen the market for their books shrink as presses cut back on specialized titles. Signale is an effort to address what a Modern Language Association task force has identified as a "narrowing of publishing possibilities" for scholars in the humanities, said Kizer Walker, a Cornell librarian who serves as series managing editor.

"We are attempting to find a sustainable model that draws on the expertise of traditional players in scholarly communication in the humanities -- the university press, the library and the scholars themselves -- but reconfigures and enhances the way these groups work together," Walker said. "Part of our aim is to provide a model from which others can learn, and not only at Cornell -- particularly in the smaller humanities fields where publishing is proving difficult to sustain."

Signale monographs will undergo a rigorous editorial and peer-review process by an interdisciplinary board of Cornell faculty and an advisory board of top scholars in German studies at North American universities.

"There are not too many presses that publish German literary studies and cultural studies in English," Walker said, adding that he hopes "that Signale can be part of a Cornell-wide engagement with the complex issues facing scholarly communication in the humanities and in other fields as well."

The Mellon grant includes a provision for business planning for the new series, and the Cornell partners hope to provide a sustainable business model for publishing in the field that can be replicated in other disciplines facing similar pressures.

"Signale is a wonderful idea," said associate professor of English Samantha Zacher. "It's getting much harder to place books, especially some of the more specialized monographs that won't sell a lot. This … could be a great solution to keeping that spirit of scholarship alive."

Cornell University Press Director John G. Ackerman called the effort "an unprecedented partnership" that will aid scholarly publishing and humanities scholarship.

"As university presses explore new business models for publishing in the digital age, we must seek to partner with others, both within and outside Cornell," he said.

The series' first book will be "Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination," by John Griffith Urang, to be published in May. It will be followed in June by the first published English translation of "Paradigms for a Metaphorology," a key 1963 text by philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Two more titles on architecture and literature will be published later this year.

"Signale is a concrete and necessary intervention that will greatly advance scholarship in German studies," said series editor Peter Uwe Hohendahl, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German and Comparative Literature. "This discipline -- as a broad, cross-disciplinary field -- is exceptionally strong at Cornell, so it is appropriate that we are undertaking this here, on behalf of the larger community of scholars."

In addition to titles slated for publication in 2011, more manuscripts and proposals are under review. Submissions are encouraged.

"One part of Signale's mission is to provide a venue for outstanding first books, but we also have books in the works from midcareer and senior scholars," Walker said. "We anticipate publishing about three or four titles a year for the duration of the grant and beyond."

For more information, visit http://signale.cornell.edu or e-mail Walker at kw33@cornell.edu.

Gwen Glazer in library communications and Linda Glaser in the College of Arts and Sciences contributed to this article.