Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Christy Jarvis. Christy is Associate Director for Scholarly Communications at the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah.

Several months ago, an NIH-funded researcher contacted me with what seemed like a straightforward problem. She was the corresponding author on a paper accepted by a journal covered under one of our institution’s Read & Publish agreements. She was eligible.

The publisher’s system insisted she wasn’t.

We eventually discovered why. The journal permits multiple corresponding authors, and its workflow had evaluated institutional eligibility using the other corresponding author’s affiliation rather than hers. The article was ultimately published under the agreement.

Problem solved.

Except it wasn’t.

Only later did I realize that I wasn’t simply helping one researcher publish one paper. I was doing the largely invisible work of integrating scholarly publishing.

Months later, I’m still trying to understand how the publisher’s workflow determines institutional eligibility when multiple corresponding authors are involved. The publisher graciously processed this case as an “exception,” but has not been able to explain how their workflow handles these situations more generally.

That matters because this isn’t about one researcher. Multiple corresponding authors are increasingly common, and I’ve encountered dozens of similar cases while analyzing NIH-funded publications from my institution. If I can’t understand how this workflow behaves, I can’t confidently advise the next researcher who encounters it.

The researcher experienced one publication.

The institution experiences them all.

That realization has fundamentally changed how I think about scholarly publishing.

A Different Vantage Point

I occupy an unusual place within the scholarly publishing ecosystem. I help guide institutional strategy and investment decisions around publishing agreements. I analyze institutional publishing data to evaluate those investments. I provide day-to-day support for researchers navigating publisher workflows. And, as an NIH-funded investigator myself, I experience many of these same systems from the author’s perspective. Those roles rarely intersect. When they do, however, they reveal something that isn’t obvious from any single vantage point.

The greatest challenge isn’t supporting individual authors. It’s understanding how the system behaves.

Measuring the Wrong Thing

Not long ago, I began tracking the time I spent supporting institutional publishing agreements because I suspected much of the work was invisible. Over six months, I documented more than 219 hours devoted to consultations, troubleshooting, metadata investigations, eligibility determinations, publisher communications, compliance questions, reporting, and follow-up. Those observations eventually became the basis for a study of the “invisible labor” required to administer institutional publishing agreements.

Looking back, however, I think I was measuring the symptom rather than the underlying phenomenon. I thought I was documenting administrative burden. What I was actually observing was institutions serving as the integration layer for scholarly publishing.

Integration Is Becoming Institutional Work

I don’t believe this is a story about poorly designed publisher workflows. Quite the opposite.

Every publisher I’ve worked with has built workflows that make sense within its own environment. Their policies reflect legitimate business needs. Their metadata supports their operations. Their systems are optimized to manage their own publishing programs. The challenge emerges when institutions interact with all of them simultaneously.

Each publisher introduces its own workflows, terminology, metadata, eligibility logic, dashboards, reporting structures, and exception processes. No single system is particularly difficult to understand.

The complexity emerges because they accumulate. Publisher by publisher. Workflow by workflow. Exception by exception.

Increasingly, institutions find themselves performing work that looks remarkably similar to systems integration — connecting researchers, publisher platforms, institutional identities, funder requirements, local policies, repositories, and compliance workflows into something that functions as a coherent publishing service. Yet we rarely describe that as institutional work.

Researchers Need Publications. Institutions Need Understanding.

As an author, I’ve never needed to understand how dozens of publisher workflows interact. I only needed my paper to publish successfully. Researchers shouldn’t have to think about the operational complexity behind institutional publishing support. That’s exactly the point.

Institutions have a different responsibility. Resolving today’s publishing problem is only part of the job. Institutional responsibility also means understanding not only that a workflow works, but how it works, so that knowledge can be applied consistently to the next researcher — and the one after that.

Increasingly, I spend as much time trying to understand how publishing systems behave as I do helping authors navigate them. That work rarely appears in usage statistics, publishing counts, or annual reports, yet it has become essential to providing consistent, scalable support.

A Conversation Worth Having

Much of the discussion surrounding transformative agreements has focused, appropriately, on financial sustainability, publishing outcomes, and institutional return on investment. Those conversations should continue. But perhaps another question deserves a place alongside them.

As scholarly publishing becomes increasingly interconnected, are we paying enough attention to its operational sustainability?

If institutions have quietly become the integration layer connecting researchers, publishers, funders, institutional systems, and compliance requirements, are we giving enough attention to the institutional experience of scholarly publishing?

We devote considerable effort to improving the author experience. We invest heavily in publisher platforms. We continue to strengthen research infrastructure. But who is intentionally designing for the institution that must make all of those systems work together?

That isn’t a criticism of publishers, libraries, or technology providers. Each has understandably focused on solving the problems immediately in front of them. Yet from the institutional perspective, those individual solutions increasingly converge into a single operational ecosystem—one that libraries and research offices are increasingly responsible for integrating on behalf of their communities.

Researchers experience one publication.

Institutions experience them all.

Author’s note: The anonymized time-tracking dataset that informed these observations is openly available in the University of Utah’s institutional repository: https://thehive.utah.edu/concern/datasets/cj82k7395?locale=en