The World Wide Web entered the public domain in 1993.
An early CHNM project, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was launched in 1997. Within one of the early grants for the project, the authors stated: "We think it is important to experiment with providing public access to the historical resources developed under this grant by making at least one of the four main sections of this disc freely available online to students across the country."
Put on the web in 1998, History Matters was another early project from CHNM and American Social History Project. Within the first project summary, the authors wrote that "the Internet can be a vehicle for democratizing education rather than simply reinforcing existing inequalities."
Roy Rosenzweig publishes "Should Historical Scholarship be Free?" in April 2005, in which he argues for open access scholarly journals.
SmartFox was released in October 2006 and is known today as Zotero. SmartFox was created to be a free and open source software, furthering Roy's and CHNM's mission of democratizing history.
Roy Rosenzweig's article "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" was published in June 2006. Roy urges historians to look toward the model of free and open access material propogated by Wikipedia rather than commercializing their scholarship and projects.
Omeka first received funding in 2007, and is another free and open source software created by CHNM. In the 2008 press release, Omeka is described as "put[ting] serious web publishings within the reach of all scholars and cultural heritage professionals. Omeka is free and open-source, easy to use, standards based, and extensible."
PressForward was developed by CHNM in 2009 and was created to be an open source platform for scholarly publications that will showcase pieces of scholarship that are often overlooked or underappreciated.