Special Issue: Digital Publishing for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The co-editors of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing introduce the first special issue of their editorship.

We are delighted to introduce our special issue. Digital publishing has come a long way since journals first began to go electronic a couple of decades ago. Whereas the focus was initially on finding ways to represent print on screen or establish good hyperlinks, we now clearly recognize that digital means much, much more than representing print online. As the contributions to this issue show, today’s new projects are at least as interested in exploring the medium’s potential for new forms of scholarship. Not surprisingly, they are also exploring how these new forms might enable interaction with new audiences, both inside and outside traditional scholarly communities.

Many digital projects clearly embrace open access as a given. But it is refreshing that the overly simplistic (and incompletely quoted) proclamation that information wants to be free has been replaced by an understanding that costs must be recovered. The articles in this issue demonstrate that sustainability is attracting more attention than ever, although there is as yet no broadly applicable solution to achieve it. Solutions involve various combinations of author fees, grants, institutional funding, volunteer labour, and end-user fees.

Some of the contributions delve into the use of multimedia; some focus on reaching within and across communities; one explores how a single scholarly piece can expand into something larger across platforms. Partnerships—within and across institutions and funding agencies—abound. We have much to learn from the articles at hand, whether it’s overcoming cross-platform issues, using multimedia, enabling richer annotation, involving and empowering exciting new communities, or addressing issues of the day at first quickly and later in more detail. All in all, it has become clear to us that digital publishing does indeed take a village.

Of the four articles that compose this special issue, two are written by publishing professionals and two by working scholars.

In the opening article, co-authors Andrea Hacker and Elizabeth Corrao tell the editorial and production story behind launching a monograph series for Heidelberg University’s new press. The many novelties inherent to their project, with its aim of publishing gold open access monographs with an innovative HTML display, presented the co-authors with lots of unanticipated problems that threatened to derail the project. The coauthors describe their technical difficulties lucidly, but the inspiring part of the story is how they persevered to achieve their original goal despite the many setbacks. In the next article, co-authors Danielle M. Kasprzak and Terence Smyre offer vigorous theoretical explanations of the acquisitions and design work involved in the Forerunners series, in which a scholar’s evolving research is published at a much more formative stage than a finished monograph. An experiment in the iterative publishing of ‘grey literature,’ the Forerunners series of the University of Minnesota Press works in conjunction with its Manifold open-source publishing platform.

In the first of the scholar-authored contributions, Cheryl E. Ball, a professor of digital writing studies at West Virginia University, describes her twenty years’ experience editing Kairos, a scholarly multimedia journal, as preparatory to building Vega, an adaptable multimedia publishing platform with modular tools that aims to support editors and authors, technologically and educationally, who are interested in digital publication. Although the technological difficulties in publishing scholarly multimedia are many, Ball also discusses the social and disciplinary factors that can undermine a new digital publishing venture. In the second scholar-authored article, co-authors Stephen Danley, Tom Dahan, and Keith Benson describe how the Local Knowledge Blog at Rutgers University–Camden bridges the producer–consumer publishing divide that separates the residents of Camden, New Jersey, from the resident university. The blog helps to transform service-learning into co-generation of knowledge between the community and the institution.

Lastly, rounding out the issue, Steven E. Gump reviews a book that theorizes the preparation of digital scholarly editions by textual scholars.

Feeling proud at the successful outcome of our first special issue as co-editors, we are...