Manifold Possibilities
Manifold is the friendly, scalable, sustainable way to add the web to your publishing workflow.
What are people making with Manifold?
- Athabasca University Press uses Manifold to deliver their growing catalog of open access books.
- California Digital Library is publishing medical texts with animated resources.
- The City University of New York publishes scholarly student editions of historical texts for classroom use.
- Affordable Learning Georgia is publishing open access textbooks to replace commercial options.
- University of Minnesota Press authors are using Manifold to share draft chapters with their readers.
How does Manifold work?
Every Manifold library, no matter how sophisticated, is built on a few very simple concepts.
Install your Manifold
A Manifold installation is a library of projects. A project can be all kinds of things: a monograph, an essay, a primary text, a journal article, a journal issue, or a collection of resources.
Create your projects
Projects contain resources, texts, and information about the project itself. Texts can come from many sources, including EPUBs, Google Docs, Markdown, HTML, and Word docs.
Expand your projects
Resources allow you to add media and files that grow your project beyond its texts. You can add nearly anything: video, audio, images, downloads, data visualizations, PDFs, external links, and more.
Engage your community
Authors and readers can annotate texts and comment on resources. Students and instructors can form reading groups to annotate collaboratively.
Academic software doesn’t have to hurt.
We want Manifold to be a pleasure to use—as fast, responsive, and clean as it can be.
That’s why we designed and built it with popular, forward-thinking technologies using modern development practices, and why we center every feature we add around our users’ experience.
The Manifold platform consists of two primary components—the client application and the API—and a few complimentary microservices. To simplify installation, we offer fully managed OS packages, Docker images, and paid hosting services. Visit our documentation for all the details.
Built by scholars and publishers, for scholars and publishers.
Manifold is a collaboration between the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding, and each group brings a unique perspective to the project: scholarship, publishing, and technology.
Manifold is, and always will be, 100 percent open source and free.
Our project exists thanks to the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As Manifold grows, we’re looking for partners to help shape the platform’s future and build a sustainable path forward.
No Manifold is an island.
We’ve piloted Manifold at more than thirty organizations and are proud of our ever-growing community.
Our users’ experiences and ideas inform the work we do and the future of the platform.
Get started.
Install Manifold yourself or enlist our experienced team to guide you.
Need some help getting started with Manifold? We offer hosting and training services.
If you just wanna look under the hood and kick our digital tires, set up a trial installation.
If you already have the resources and technical skills, you can install Manifold on your own.
