Call for Papers
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Publishing Studies, the annual conference of the Information, Medium & Society Research Network, hosted by the University of Split, Croatia, with online participation available.
The conference is convened in close intellectual relationship with the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network, reflecting a shared understanding that questions of publishing, information, and media are inseparable from humanistic concerns. Issues of meaning, interpretation, authority, access, memory, and public life are not only studied in the humanities; they are enacted, negotiated, and institutionalised through publishing platforms and infrastructures.
Mediated Worlds: Platforms, Infrastructures, and the Making of Social Reality
The humanities ask how meaning is made, interpreted, circulated, and sustained across social worlds. Publishing is one of the primary sites where these questions take material and institutional form.
Mediated Worlds approaches publishing as a mediating practice and cultural infrastructure. Editorial systems, publishing workflows, libraries, archives, databases, discovery tools, and digital platforms do more than distribute content; they actively shape how knowledge becomes visible, credible, accessible, and durable. Through these infrastructures, meanings are authorised, contested, preserved, or lost.
In dialogue with the humanities theme Archipelagos of Meaning, the conference understands publishing infrastructures as connective tissue between distinct yet interrelated worlds: scholarly and public, institutional and informal, local and global. Editors, publishers, librarians, technologists, and designers work at these thresholds, making judgments that shape trust, participation, and the social life of knowledge.
The conference invites contributions that examine publishing not simply as an industry or technical process, but as a domain in which humanistic questions are worked out in practice—through platforms, policies, professional norms, and everyday decisions.
Themes
Proposals are welcomed across the field of publishing and information studies, including but not limited to the following five interrelated sub-themes:
Editorial Judgment, Trust, and Knowledge Authority: Peer review, selection, framing, standards, and professional judgment as foundations of legitimacy, credibility, and trust in scholarly and public knowledge cultures.
Platforms, Infrastructures, and Publishing Workflows: Submission and review systems, metadata and discovery tools, distribution platforms, analytics, interoperability, and governance, and their implications for labour, scale, and sustainability.
Libraries, Archives, and Knowledge Stewardship: Libraries and archives as long-term infrastructures of access, preservation, and memory, including digitisation, metadata, discovery, institutional responsibility, and practices of care.
Access, Sustainability, and the Political Economy of Publishing: Economic, legal, and policy frameworks shaping who can publish and who can read, including open access models, funding structures, rights management, and long-term sustainability.
Automation, AI, and the Mediation of Knowledge: The role of automation and artificial intelligence in publishing and information systems, including authorship, editorial support, bias, ethics, transparency, and the relationship between human judgment and machine systems.
Format
The conference is organised as a hybrid knowledge experience, integrating in-person and online participation within a unified scholarly environment. All accepted proposals become Presentation Pages, where presenters upload abstracts, media, and reflections, and where participants engage in discussion before, during, and after the event.
In-person presentations hosted by the University of Split, live online sessions, and asynchronous contributions are woven together into a single integrated program. Regardless of participation mode, all delegates have access to the full schedule, session media, and a growing digital archive.
Across all formats, the emphasis is on reciprocal, human-scale scholarly exchange—conversation, reflection, and collaborative inquiry rather than one-directional presentation. The conference format itself reflects its theme, foregrounding publishing platforms as environments in which knowledge is actively shaped.
Publication Pathways
Presenters are invited to develop their work for possible publication in the outlets associated with the Information, Medium & Society Research Network. Contributions may be developed for Information, Medium & Society: Journal of Publishing Studies or for the Information, Medium & Society Book Imprint, which publish research examining media, information, and knowledge as expressed through publishing practices, platforms, and infrastructures. All publication outlets offer both traditional and Open Access options.
Invitation
We warmly invite editors, publishers, librarians, researchers, technologists, designers, and scholars from across disciplines and methodological traditions to submit proposals and to join us—either in Split or online—for the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Publishing Studies.
By situating publishing within its humanistic context, the conference offers a space to reflect critically and constructively on how platforms and infrastructures mediate meaning, shape authority, and sustain the social life of knowledge.
Sincerely,
Dr. Ina Reić Ercegovac, Conference Chair, Full Professor, Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia
Dr. Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, Research Network Chair; Chief Social Scientist, Common Ground Research Networks, United States of America