The Network Model of Publishing

It’s easy to overlook the fact that print and digital are not simply formats but entire ecosystems as well. For those of us who labor in the mines of STM journals, this oversight is understandable, as we can be lulled (asphyxiated?) into believing that all the world is digital, artifacts of “print consciousness” notwithstanding (e.g., the PDF, the version of record). (Yes, print consciousness may be the topic of a forthcoming post.) If print and digital did not in fact represent entire ecosystems, when digital products came along they would have just been slotted into the place that print once occupied. But we know that is not what happened.