As part of an ongoing series of campus conversations about open access and scholarly publishing issues hosted by MPublishing, this talk will explore some of these changes, including shifts in the ways that we approach peer review, transformations in our conceptions of authorship, revisions in the structures of scholarly texts, increased attention to preservation in our libraries, and new partnerships among libraries, presses, and information technology departments in thinking about the place of publishing within the university infrastructure.

While much attention has been paid in recent years to the digital future of scholarship, and in particular to the technological and infrastructural development necessary to new publishing structures, there is a set of social, intellectual, and institutional changes that will be a precondition for any such technological development, as new publishing models promise substantive changes in the ways we write, the ways we publish, and the ways we review scholarly work. Faculty, technologists, librarians, and administrators will thus all need to understand the work of scholarship and its place within the university differently in order for any digital publishing future to become a viable reality.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is is the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, (NYU Press, forthcoming), which is currently available online as part of an experimental open review process <http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence>. She is also co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing network focused on the field of media studies.