Sustainability and emerging issues in scholarly (self-)publishing

In American academic circles, peer-reviewed hard-copy book publishing remains a crucial part of the tenure and promotion process as well as a method of bestowing prestige upon authors accepted by university presses and other mainstream venues. Although a few respected individuals self-published as early as the seventeenth century, the emergence of desktop publishing during the 1980s led to hard-copy and virtual (self-)publishing venues of several kinds, including PDF formatting and the establishment of POD (print on demand) firms. Online, PDF, POD printing, and other challenges to traditional academic publishing can save money and improve efficiency as well as help sustain our forests and other natural resources.