Timothy W. Elfenbein

Academic Interests

Commons Groups

HC

Recent Commons Activity

deposited The Challenge of Metadata Dis… in the group Scholarly Communication
deposited The Challenge of Metadata Dis… in the group Open Access Books Network
deposited The Challenge of Metadata Dis… in the group COPIM

About

I am a wayward researcher and practitioner of scholarly publishing, and the principal of Forthcoming LLC, a publishing consultancy.

Education

BA, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, 2002

MS, School of Library and Information Science, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 2013

PhD program, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 2003–2005

PhD program, Department of Informatics, University of California–Irvine, 2015–2019

[It’s complicated]

Mastodon Feed

Now that I've moved to Saint Martin, I'm finding that much local news coverage and P2P commerce happens on Facebook. While I've kept my old FB account, I haven't used in it years. Can anyone point me to resources on how to use FB while withholding as much of my data as possible? (2025-09-19 ↗)

The KCWorks repository service for institutions is now up and running. https://about.hcommons.org/2025/07/18/announcing-kcworks-for-institutions-a-hosted-repository-that-works-for-you/ From: @timelfen https://assemblag.es/@timelfen/114355879689118302 (2025-07-23 ↗)

Limn Issue 12: Climate's Interiors is out now online and in print. Read anywhere with the link below. https://limn.press/issue/climates-interiors/ (2025-06-19 ↗)

Many people have this sense that the price of books is primarily linked to the cost of materials, manufacture, & distribution. But the majority of the cost of publishing books are in the labor leading up to the 1st copy: editorial & editorial production work, before any reproduction in whatever format. Addition labor happens later, for marketing. When you buy a book, you’re mainly paying for these kinds of labor. From: @breadandcircuses https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/114529080807036340 (2025-05-18 ↗)

Fragment from an email to the editor of a special issue on scholarly communication: “All of this would be vaguely review-ish.” (2025-05-02 ↗)

Blog Posts

Publications

Elfenbein, Timothy. 2014. “Cultural Anthropology and the Infrastructure of Publishing”. Cultural Anthropology> 29, no. 2: 288–303. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.06.

Elfenbein, Timothy W. 2013. “Metadata Pragmatics: Toward a Unified Semiotic Framework.” Masters paper, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, School of Library and Information Science, May. https://doi.org/10.17615/yzbs-2j92.

Projects

Assistant Managing Editor, Books Division, Duke University Press, 2008–2011

Managing Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2013–2015

Principal, Forthcoming LLC (a publishing consultancy), 2021–

Project Manager, Thoth Metadata Management and Dissemination System, Community-led Open Publication Infrastructure for Monographs project, 2021–2022

Research Affiliate, Invest in Open Infrastructure, 2022–2023

Scholarly Communication Researcher/Practitioner/Gadfly

Forthcoming LLC