This guide is designed to help the Penn community navigate the digital scholarly publishing landscape and identify considerations for creating multimodal, born-digital, and hybrid publications; how to leverage unique digital tools and platforms to support short- and long-form narrative; and how to identify digital publishing resources for teaching and research. Learn more about options for creating digital publications at Penn and beyond through the pages of this guide.
Digital publications offer pathways for scholars to leverage digital tools or research methods to support short- and long- form narrative. Digital publications can exist in many formats that support research and teaching, and may be developed as the main publication or as an ancillary to a print publication. Although e-pub and e-reader type publications have been available digitally for some time, authors' increased interest in embedding digital tools or resources in publications that would otherwise be flattened in print, like a video file, has led academic presses and libraries to develop platforms and establish editorial workflows to create digital publications that include multimodal resources.
Digital publications offer unique affordances for publishing scholarship by enabling authors to articulate scholarly ideas through innovative uses of interactive digital tools, data, and multimedia enhancements. Academic libraries and presses acquire and support the development of a broad range of publication types including monographs, journals, novella (mid-length) projects, and special projects with varying amount of text. There are multiple approaches to translating these publication types into digital formats: Some of the main formats include:
Learn more about digital publishing considerations through the following resources:
Smith, Kylie. “Why I Chose Open Access and Manifold,” in Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South (Manifold edition).
