Day: Monday, May 4, 2:45 PM to 3:45 PM
Room: TBD
That’s a pretty big job, eh? Supporting Open Infrastructure in Canada—Lessons from Coalition Publica
Presenters: Jessica Clark, Coalition Publica/Érudit; James MacGregor, Public Knowledge Project (PKP)
Description: North of the 49th parallel, an ambitious national project is afoot to build open infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing and research. Known as Coalition Publica (www.coalition-publi.ca), this project is spearheaded by partners Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), two long-established Canadian leaders in scholarly communication.
Officially launched in 2017, Coalition Publica has developed both technical infrastructure and a harmonized suite of services in consultation with the Canadian scholarly communications community, combining PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Érudit’s centralized dissemination platform (erudit.org). Almost 40 journals, based at 20 different hosting institutions, are now benefiting from Coalition Publica’s infrastructure and services.
But providing support across the miles—sorry, kilometres—isn’t easy and the Coalition Publica team has learned valuable lessons about supporting open infrastructure in a distributed context, in areas such as coordinating distributed teams, de/centralizing information, managing documentation, and communications with stakeholders. Jessica Clark, Coalition Publica Project Coordinator, and James MacGregor, PKP’s Associate Director of Strategic Projects and Services, will share their experiences of marshalling a distributed support network across 10 provinces, two official languages, and a growing number of evolving priorities.
While the Canadian context presents some unique challenges, Coalition Publica’s experience may be informative for other open infrastructure projects, seeing as these are an increasingly common approach to providing national-level scholarly publishing support. James and Jessica also hope to exchange with LPF attendees about their challenges and successes in supporting open infrastructure or similar distributed projects.