Experimental Scholarly Publishing: Building New Models with Distributed Communities of Practice

This presentation was delivered on October 28th, 2014 as part of the panel session on Experimental Scholarly Publishing: Building New Models with Distributed Communities of Practice at the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum. The 2014 DLF Forum was held on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, GA.As library publishing becomes increasingly synonymous with offering traditional journal publishing services, it’s critical that libraries also engage in experimental publishing initiatives. Recent experimental publishing projects, particularly in the digital humanities, have combined basic web technologies to create a new model for aggregating, curating, and disseminating scholarly content using a process that fosters community and resource-sharing. This panel examines the innovations in scholarly publishing offered by the PressForward WordPress plugin, which fosters communities of practices through a post-publication filtering model. The panel will provide an overview of the PressForward plugin and then discuss how different groups, particularly library groups, are adapting this model in different contexts. For example, the PressForward Project initially created the plugin to highlight and distribute informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web. Similarly, dh+lib aims to give increased presence and voice to librarians interested in digital humanities, and uses the plugin to distribute a weekly curated selection of the most relevant and timely content. And the ALCTS/LITA Metadata Standards Committee is using the plugin to create a publication for its community of practice designed to go beyond a current awareness service to fostering skill building and deeper community engagement. In examining these projects, we will reveal how the audience can replicate this model for their own library-based and scholarly publishing projects.Librarie