Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models....

This paper describes three important pillars of publishing programs emerging at university libraries: providing a robust publishing platform, engaging the academic community in discussions about scholarly communication, and building a suite of production level services. The experiences of the Public Knowledge Project, the Simon Fraser University Library, and the University of Toronto Library’s ...

Is disruptive change coming to the scholarly world? Friction has been mounting in the scholarly workflow as well as scholarly publishing. After an introductory clarification of the workflow versus publishing, I go on to examine telltales of scholarly friction, which can be inferred from the over 600 small fixes that have been invented in the past years to keep the system going. Next, I turn to ...

This article examines the current difficulties faced in penetrating the world of scholarly communication technology. While there have been large strides forward in the disintermediation of digital publishing expertise—most notably by the Public Knowledge Project—a substantial number of barriers remain. This paper examines a case study in terms of scholarly typesetting and the Journal Article Ta...