Redesigning Scholarly Communications Workflows and Work Habits for the Digital Age: The Greenhouse Studios Proposal

Greenhouse Studios | Scholarly Communications Design at UConn is a shared venture of the School of Fine Arts, UConn Library, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Backed by long-term university investments of staff and space, Greenhouse Studios aims to institute on its university's campus, and share with others involved in academic publishing, a workflow and work culture suited to the creation of multimodal scholarly communications. This article summarizes the research, undertaken with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that informed the development of a design-based, inquiry-driven, collaboration-first model of scholarly production that places continuous, close, and equitable scholarly communications labour at the heart of its mission. The model draws together divided workflows and flattens counter-productive hierarchies that, as vestiges of print-only traditions, impede fuller realization of the possibilities offered by the diverse range of digital and hybrid forms that increasingly define the publishing landscape.