Publicationby

Publicationby is a term encountered in certain bibliographic and data-modeling contexts to denote the entity responsible for releasing a work to the public. In practice, it functions similarly to the concept of a publisher, but it is often used in schemas that separate the publication act from other stages of production, such as imprint, production, or distribution. When present, the publicationby field identifies the actor that disseminates the final, public version of a work, while other fields may record the publisher’s imprint or the production house.

The term is not part of the standard bibliographic vocabulary used by major metadata schemas. Dublin Core and schema.org, for example, rely on a dedicated publisher property rather than a separate publicationby field. As a result, publicationby tends to appear only in custom schemas, legacy catalogs, or data-export layers where systems have chosen to model publication responsibilities with more granularity. When publicationby is used, it is common to pair it with persistent identifiers and controlled vocabularies to reduce ambiguity about organizational roles and to aid interoperability.

In cataloging practice, the distinction between publicationby and related fields can affect search results, rights statements, and provenance records. Users should prefer standard terms whenever possible and treat publicationby as a contextual or legacy term, relied upon only within systems that explicitly define its scope and semantics. See also publisher, imprint, production, and distribution.