Digital Publications beyond Digital Communication

Abstract

Since more than twenty years different stakeholders involved in scholarly publishing have tried to fundamentally rethink the shape of publications in a digital environment. In contrast to these abundant activities with their highly experimental character the same stakeholders continuously regret that the dominant form of digital publications is still the PDF. In the research literature, the situation of digital publications is often compared with the era of the printing press. While this comparison might be helpful to create awareness about the dimension in which changes are taking place it certainly also blurs significant differences. In the situation that was described before it is even more important to identify the peculiarities of the process of change. Fortunately, the story of digital scholarly publications is long enough to tell it in a way in which these peculiarities become more transparent. The study at hand is an attempt to do so. At its end, it becomes clear that the major issue in digital publishing is not so much connected to the questions how publications look digitally but what we may perceive as a publication in a digital environment.