Since the mid-1990s, multiple journals have been experimenting with publishing digital, interactive multimedia as part of the scholarly record. This multimedia has taken several forms, across a spectrum of print-like to fully screen-based research, from a majority of alphabetic text and a few images to audio and video-based websites. Commercial publishers such as Elsevier and Sage have begun offering online appendices where authors can publish multimedia and data content supplemental to the print-like articles appearing in their closed-access journals. Other journals have been including multimedia in more radical ways, such as Kairos, Vectors and the Journal of Artistic Research.

Scholarly academic peer-reviewed and creative arts research journals and university presses have made a number of advances to include more robust multimedia content – what we refer to here as webtexts. Webtexts are multimedia-rich, digital, screen-based texts designed to enact an author's scholarly argument. Webtexts can be equivalent in intellectual scope to an article or a book, in which authors design their argument using linked webpages or database-driven platforms, animations, images, audio, video, programming languages and written text. The purpose of authoring a webtext is found in the communication potential and additional layers of meaning making that multiple media and networked writing afford (see Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Norman, 1999).

Yet, these multiple modes are not quickly embraced in academic publishing, as witnessed by the short list of journals that publish multimedia content as argument. This is content that is realized in a mix of media types, such as video or animation. The sections below present frameworks for understanding multimodal academic publishing – a mix of written, spoken, visual and dynamic modes of communicating (Morrison, 2010) – through the aspects of scholarly, social and technical infrastructure.