There are four kinds of organization models of American academic libraries' participation in digital publishing: setting up a special digital publishing sector, cooperating with press, cooperating with open access organizations and also cooperating with scholars. Through the case analysis, this paper explores the connotation and operation mechanism of various organization models. It is found that there are three characteristics in the process of American academic libraries' participation in digital publishing: high attention, professional management and diversified cooperation, which are of great significance for our academic libraries to participate in digital publishing.