Open Publication, Digital Abundance, and Scarce Labour

Abstract: "This article examines the challenges of labour provision in the open-access online scholarly publishing environment. Noting that the technological underpinnings of open access imply an abundance, it is also the case that the labour that remains necessary within the publishing processes are based upon a set of economics that are scarce. I here argue, with a demonstration of some of the labours of XML typesetting, that we are unlikely to realise the transformations of abundant proliferation of scholarship without a change and re-distribution of labour functions to authors. The resultant outputs are, I argue, less likely to be machine readable and semantically rich, thereby conflicting with other imagined digital possibilities."