My presentation at the Charleston Conference, "The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship," has come and gone. I want to explore the last point I made during my talk. I didn't have time to elaborate on it much at the time, and I've been thinking more about its implications.

"What librarians can do" was the topic of my last handful of slides. My final three bullet points were these:

• Dialog with publishers
• Ask publishers to host publishing models that support social scholarship
• Ask publishers to do R&D – cooperatively with other publishers and academic institutions

The first two points are fairly obvious, given my view of things. They're an important lead-uip to the third and last point, the one I want to address.

What might be the ideal publishing platform for social scholarship? I assume this will always be a moving target as our ideas develop about what might work well and as our experiments shape our preferences. The basis of social scholarship, with its roots in author and reader participation, will drive the platform. I predict that social publishing platforms will be as common as the hands-off platforms that currently predominate. But getting there from here will be an extremely difficult challenge.

Let's leave aside the general lack of readiness on the part of commercial scholarly publishers to move in this direction. At Charleston, for example, I sensed a combination of business as usual along with an anxious background sense that things need to change. For argument's sake, let's say that, little by little, publishers agree that their online platforms need to reflect the tenets and practices of social scholarship. How will they go about entering this space en masse?

I've always been a proponent of scalability. So I honestly don't see how publishers can each, on their own, do the work of researching, developing, testing, deploying, maintaining, and enhancing social publishing platforms. The time is ripe for collaboration.

Think of it. Publishers that maintain online platforms all have a stake (once they admit it) in developing modern platforms to meet the evolving needs - if not demands - of their customers. These platforms will be far more complex than what they offer now. Cooperative R&D makes sense in a fast-moving environment that requires fundamental changes in what these publishers do online. Without partnerships, and without sufficient resources, individual publishers run the risk of falling far behind. And the industry as a whole risks becoming marginalized as the publishing platform of choice. To put it very simply, 1.0 publishing platforms in an emerging 2.0 scholarly world is untenable.

I've been thinking about the role of university presses in taking up the slack. It's an interesting thought. Universities have infrastructure, software developers, and scholars. This could be a potent brew.

It isn't unusual for businesses to partner with each other. And it's far from unusual for businesses to pay attention to the input of their customers - this is called survival.

Whatever develops needs to do so in collaboration with scholars who are experimenting with social scholarship. There's a new generation of scholars who will make up the next generation of customers. If publishers fail this up-and-coming generation, these scholars will search out alternative publishing models. Pre and post-print repositories, wikis, the networked book and the like, are only the beginning. It's in the interest of scholarly publishers to collaborate on developing new kinds of platforms. If they put their best minds together, everyone has the potential to benefit.