Designing Digital Infrastructure: Four Considerations for Scholarly Publishing Projects

摘要

We all want it—a website, a comment feed, a place for people to connect, and now, social media buttons, too—but how do we get there? Miles stand between a vision for digital infrastructure (i.e., the many scales, materials, and dynamics that produce the digital tools that we interface with, such as websites) and a functioning platform; the majority of us have limited knowledge of what exists behind interfaces used every day, publishing platforms included. Yet our scholarship increasingly becomes digital—produced, circulated, and discussed in electronic and online formats. Cultural Anthropology (CA) partakes in this broader socio-technical transition; for more than eight years now, the journal has been incrementally moving to a digital format, and in experimental ways (Fortun 2003). Far from going open access (OA) overnight, the Society for Cultural Anthropology has been building digital infrastructure around CA since 2007. While other articles in this special collection stay close to the core debates and dynamics of OA, this essay considers issues, relationships, and materials that have been made, in my view, peripheral in our OA discussion, albeit perhaps for good reason. The infrastructure described is not specific to OA, but it makes open access possible. Thus, by tracing the long-term socio-technical work that made it possible for CA to go gold OA earlier this year, 1) this essay works to make visible some behind-the-scenes details that should be considered by organizations thinking about going OA.