The University of Alberta Faculty of Law would like to congratulate our colleague, Professor Annalise Acorn, on her recent appointment as an expert in Law for the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP) of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
For over seven decades the work of Canadian scholars has been supported by the unique program that is known as the ASPP. The program is designed to assist the publication of works of advanced scholarship which make an important contribution to knowledge, in the areas of the humanities and social sciences. Book-length manuscripts are considered for the ASPP process if they meet the programs eligibility criteria. The ASPP is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), but run by the non-profit Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The program is governed by two committees comprised of peers responsible, respectively, for policy development and manuscript review. Peer review constitutes the mainstay of the ASPP. The program is committed to the excellence and the integrity of the peer-review process.
The ASPP (then known as the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program) was initiated in 1941 by a group of Canadian scholars including Harold Adams Innis, Jean-Charles Falardeau and Northrop Frye, who deemed that Canada should have a means by which it could support the dissemination of humanities and social sciences research generated by Canadian scholars. Since its inception, the ASPP has supported over 6,000 scholarly books, with the majority of them published by Canada's leading scholarly publishing houses. As the program has grown in leaps and bounds over the many years, so has there been a paralleled growth of Canada's intellectual community and the universities and scholarly publishers that helped nurture it.
The ASPP contributes approximately 1.5 million dollars each year towards the dissemination of Canadian research and scholarship, through it grants. Each year the program proffers 180 Publication Grants of $8,000 and five Translation Grants of $12,000. The program also sponsors a number of book prizes, including the Canada Prize in the Humanities, the Canada Prize in Social Sciences, the Prix du Canada en sciences humaines, and the Prix du Canada en sciences sociales. These prizes are awarded to the best ASPP-supported books each year. As well, the program organizes sessions at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (which, like the ASPP, is run by the Federation) on issues such as getting a scholarly work published and the marketing of the scholarly book.