The university as publisher revisited

This article explores the growing involvement of libraries in providing publishing services for the informal scholarly outputs traditionally referred to as ‘gray literature’. By envisioning institutional repository (IR) infrastructure as a publishing platform, libraries can bring conference proceedings, technical reports, niche journals, white papers and other hard-to-source materials into the mainstream. The opportunities of such an approach for scholars, libraries and university presses open to collaboration are considered. Several directions for future expansion of this activity, such as the publication of student scholarship and the development of more formal products linked to gray literature, are suggested