Hybrid Publishing Lab

Academic communication in the digital age

The Hybrid Publishing Lab researches, develops and engages with new forms of academic publishing and communication for the digital era.

Digital distribution channels have changed the access to science and education as well as the further use of academic knowledge thereby introducing important keywords like Open Access and Open Science. New forms of communication are on the rise like scholarly blogs, videos of conference lectures, or the distribution of academic papers via the universities’ repositories. However, for a qualitative evaluation, a consistent quotation, a long term data archiving as well as for an economically viable publishing solutions that will prove satisfactory still have to be found. The new technologies of a global, instant and interactive publishing have to be made available to the humanities in their digital era – an interesting and important challenge.

Working with publishers, librarians, software developers, and authors the Hybrid Publishing Lab, part of the Lüneburg Innocation Incubator from 2012 to 2015, engaged with new concepts and technologies of digital publishing particularly focusing on the humanities. By embedding these results into economic projects, for example with setting up a “Hybrid Publishing Consortium” to consult about Open Source software solutions, academic research was not only turned into an applied experiment but into a business model. Central for the Lab’s projects was the idea of open access regarding education, academic knowledge and research, as well as a strong curiosity about new business models in a disruptive digital environment.

Selected Projects and Event Highlights

Hyper Image

With HyperImage users can precisely tag any number of details in digitally stored pictures and add descriptions. The software, further developed in the Incubator research project Hybrid Publishing Lab, simplifies in particular the work in image-based sciences. hyperimage.ws

The Post-Digital Scholar Conference

From 12.11.–14.11.2014, publishers, researchers, programmers, designers, artists, and entrepreneurs discussed in Lüneburg how research and publishing in the humanities have changed over the past decade. The conference „The Post-Digital Scholar: Publishing between Open Access, Piracy and Public Spheres” explored new tools for gathering knowledge, examined platforms for multimedia publishing, or collaborative writing experiments. postdigitalscholar.org

Hybrid Publishing Consortium

The project researched digital developments in publishing to establish an Open Source software infrastructure. The aim was to address the problems of small cultural and academic publishers, above all the digitization of their workflows, and the need to provide their content in various digital output formats and for different reading devices. consortium.io

Meson Press

The experimental publisher meson press publishes research on Digital Cultures and networked media to explore and apply new digital publishing practices. Its publications challenge contemporary theories and advance debates related to the Humanities in the digital age. meson.press

Blog

Read more about the Hybrid Publishing Lab, its projects and activities on the project blog:

hybridpublishing.org

Downloads

Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age
This 16-sided brochure presents the Lab and its work:
Download (deutsch)
Download (english)

How to start an OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL
A star­ter’s gui­de by the Hy­brid Pu­blis­hing Lab to fa­mi­li­a­ri­ze yours­elf with the key is­su­es in star­ting an open ac­cess jour­nal:
Download (englisch)

The Hybrid Publishing Lab was part of the Lüneburg Innovation Incubator.