New Forms of Scholarship and a Serials (R)evolution

In an abundant and constantly changing world of scholarly communication, publishers, institutions, libraries, and scholars are exploring the boundaries of traditional content containers such as an article, a journal, or a book. This article considers recent developments in digital publishing, exploring what experiments in subcompact, semantic and multimodal publishing mean for researchers and libraries. As the scholarly record evolves from its print-based version, new genres of scholarship are challenging us to re-conceptualize traditional content categories. While offering new opportunities to authors, these new forms of scholarship present challenges to the traditional tasks of providing access to, managing, and preserving scholarly content. For serials librarians, understanding developments in serials publishing can lead to extended roles and new partnerships within the knowledge ecosystem.