Manifold is an intuitive, collaborative, open-source publishing platform for interactive scholarly publishing created by a collaborative team from the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, it enables publishers to create media-rich, interactive digital publications that take advantage of the full capabilities of the web and extend the educational benefits and access of digital scholarship to more communities. The CUNY instance of Manifold focuses on the publication of Open Educational Resources (OER) and has been supported by the CUNY Office of Library Services and the State of New York.

Publishers using Manifold include the University of Minnesota Press, the City University of New York, the University of Massachusetts Press, the University of Washington Libraries and Press, Indiana University Press, The University of Arizona Press, Lapham’s Quarterly, Temple University Library and Press, Cornell University Press, and Arte Público Press, among many others.

Manifold’s intuitive interface, reader-friendly design, and annotation features have made it a leading tool to create OER materials and to extend the benefits of the latest digital scholarship to all communities. A recent grant from the National Endowment for Humanities will allow the Manifold team to expand these teaching-specific features, making the platform even more effective at engaging students with customized digital versions of open-access, openly licensed, or public domain texts. The new tools will allow instructors to create elegant, interactive, and mobile-ready texts for their students, and to collaborate with their students on digital publishing projects. Authors will also be able to create classroom versions of their open-access texts.

To see a few examples of OER and student-created works that have been created on Manifold, please visit the “Libros En Español” and “CUNY Student Edition” collections on the CUNY Manifold instance, “The Negro and the Nation” and “Selections from the Canzoniere” created by CUNY faculty members, and “The Mill on the Floss: An Anthropocene Edition,” compiled by students at the University of Washington.