Nature has dedicated a special issue of its weekly publication to exploring The Future of Publishing. The issue looks at OA publication models and arguments, features a Q&A with Robert Darnton, and highlights the role of libraries and information sciences in two articles:

Richard Monastersky’s news feature, “Publishing frontiers: The library reboot,” considers the role of the library in this publishing revolution, seeking more active engagement and integration with the scholarly research process:

Libraries are looking to assist with all stages of research, by offering guidance and tools for collecting, exploring, visualizing, labelling and sharing data. “I see us moving up the food chain and being co-contributors to the creation of new knowledge,” says Sarah Thomas, the head of libraries at the University of Oxford, UK.

• In “Scholarship: Beyond the paper,” Altmetrics evangelist Jason Priem discusses an sea change in scholarly communication with the advent of the Internet. Of note is his description of modern certification of scholarly work, which takes in our own dh+lib review model of bringing news to the surface through aggregation, nomination, and curation:

The Journal of Digital Humanities, for example, does not take submissions; rather, it highlights the best content already published online, often pulling from relatively obscure blogs and web pages. Importantly, this selection process relies heavily on altmetrics (such as number of page views, tweets and trackbacks) as a first-pass filter before manual curation.

In January, the Journal of Library Administration published a special issue devoted entirely to DH in libraries. Digital Humanities in Libraries: New Models for Scholarly Engagement features six articles that address both the theoretical and practical aspects of how libraries and librarians can engage in DH work. The issue was guest edited by Barbara Rockenbach, Director of the Humanities and History Libraries at Columbia University, who has been working to rejuvenate that institution’s Digital Humanities Center. [Our readers may recall that Ms. Rockenbach recently led a session at THATCamp Digital Humanities and Libraries focused on re-skilling librarians.]

Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Florida State University and a co-author of one of the issue’s articles, has assembled links to the open access versions of the articles. He also describes his experience negotiating his contract with the publisher to allow such access.

With contributions from Chris Alen Sula, Jennifer Vinopal and Monica McCormick, Miriam Posner, Bethany Nowviskie, Micah Vandegrift and Steward Varner, and Ben Vershbow, this special issue is an important addition to the conversation about DH and libraries that we hope to develop here at dh+lib.