Grad Student Working Group: Publishing Futures: Methods in Open Digital Scholarship

This presentation will introduce methods for digital publishing, with a focus on considerations for creating and publishing open access scholarship. It will also touch on  the emerging landscape of born-digital and multimodal publishing, including platforms, publishers, and strategies for submitting and proposing OA publications.

Topics will include: 

• What to know about publishing in OA journals
• Current trends in digital publishing formats
• Which university presses are publishing OA editions
• Digital scholarship in dissertations
• Digital publishing resources, tools, and platforms available to graduate students through Penn Libraries

Emerging platforms and methods for creating open access scholarship have enabled authors to integrate innovative digital tools and/or data, as well as media-rich enhancements in their scholarly publications. Developed in response to scholars’ increased fluency in digital humanities research methods, digital scholarly publishing platforms have expanded to support monographs, journals, and podcasts, as well as new formats unique to the digital environment. However, despite the growing interest and need for open digital publishing pathways, there remain a lot of questions around the financial costs of open access publishing, as well as tensions between print and digital formats, especially in terms of which formats “count” for hiring, tenure, and promotion committees. This presentation will address these questions and considerations and share strategies for graduate students interested in pursuing open digital publications. It should be useful for students who have DH experience but also students who are wondering about publishers’ perspectives on DH.