A few weeks ago I was discussing my publishing workflow with Chris Long and explaining that by starting on hcommons.social with a more informal post and then feeding my posts there into this blog I could begin to build a more scaffolded model of the development of publication status of my projects and ideas. After that discussion, I went back to my office and drew up an initial draft of the model as I see it. The image below is a revised version after further discussion with Chris, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Bonnie Russell, and others.
The model starts in the lower left with Mastodon as an initial starting point. Things I write in Mastodon are often short, informal, or in the true ideation stage. Occasionally they are intentional micro-posts intended to communicate an idea, project update, etc.
My Blog is the second stage and contains more long-form pieces, somewhat formal, and often revisions or extensions of thoughts from hcommons.social. Posts to the blog often have some sort of peer feedback involved in the process (e.g. my conversations around this work were not only with Chris, Kathleen, and Bonnie, but also with other colleagues from the MESH and EDLI teams).
Semi-formal publishing spaces comprise a somewhat broad range of places that involve an editorial process of some sort, and typically some sort of more formalized process of peer feedback or review. These spaces can be things like self-published works, works in open-access repositories, or library-based publishing platforms (among others). The editorial process in these is sometimes bordering on the formalized process of the next stage or could be very lightweight. Same with peer review/feedback, perhaps even a structured peer review process that functions similarly to the next step. The end product in this stage is something I consider to be a finished, published piece.
Formal journals and monographs are our more traditional notions of what publishing is. Involved and heavily structured peer review, revision, and editorial processes are common and the publication exists within a more formal end-product and typically with a known publisher.
A note to the process that came up as I worked on this post is that sometimes a piece of work may start in the blog (as it is here) and then become referenced on hcommons.social depending on the content and needs of the artifact. In this case, I wanted to ensure that a text description of the graphic was available when I posted so I opted to post it here on the blog first.