The Printing Press of the Digital Environment: A Conversation with Stanford’s Highwire Press

[Use the link above to access the complete transcription of the interview.] “What the modern printing press was to the twentieth century, digital platform providers are to the twenty-first. With the move to digital, publishers no longer need large machines, paper and ink: instead, they need software and platforms that allow them to ‘print’ work digitally. Yet these twenty-first century printing presses are often still called’ publishers’ or ‘presses,’ which makes their exact roles confusing to navigate for the average scholar. To help the average faculty member or graduate student navigate through the hazy waters of digital publishing, I will be conducting a series of interviews with various types of university presses, libraries and journals to provide a basic map of important figures in the digital publishing ecosystem. In this interview, I speak with the Stanford HighWire Press, which functions as one of the new ‘printing presses’ for scholarly work. Established in 1995, Highwire offers hosting space and a publishing platform for publishers and scholarly societies. HighWire provides the publishing platform for about 150 scholarly publishers and over 1600 journals in all disciplines, including humanities content from Duke University Press and the University of Wisconsin Press. They are not involved in the curation and editing of research, but concentrate more on providing web hosting services and platforms for managing digital content. Our conversation touched upon issues such as how Highwire makes a distinction between itself and university presses,  the open access debate to changes in the definition of “scholarly impact,” and what sorts of electronic data journals may be able to provide to individual authors. Present at the interview were Tim McCormick (@mccormicktim), Anh Bui and Laryssa Polika...”