Friday, May 10, 9:45-10:45am
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)
Determining Our Own Knowledge Futures: How Independent and Open Publishing Tools Can Lead Us Forward
Travis Rich, Knowledge Futures Group
Description: In order for mission driven publishers to flourish into the future, it is imperative that we establish our own innovation pathways. The development of open source alternatives to the stranglehold that a few commercial entities now have on not the markets for information, reputation systems, publishing technologies, and digital innovation will benefit the research community and the reading public alike. In this presentation, Travis Rich will discuss the new MIT Knowledge Futures Group (KFG), a joint initiative of the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, that seeks to transform research publishing from a closed, sequential process, into an open, community-driven one. Rich’s presentation will detail the KFG’s vision for community publishing, focusing on two KFG projects: PubPub and the Underlay.
This open source approach not only reduces the precarious dependency that most non-profit academic publishers have on costly outsourced technologies and a limited network of commercial vendors, but also provides a foundation for greater insourced experimentation and innovation. Rich will discuss some of the KFG’s own experiments, roadmap, and potential areas for collaboration with attendees.
Key themes include: innovation, open access, collaboration, new technology, community
Open-Source Publishing Software: Surveying the Landscape
John W. Maxwell, Simon Fraser University
Description: Researchers at Simon Fraser U have been conducting a landscape analysis of available open-source software for publishing; as our project comes to a conclusion, LPF provides an excellent venue to share our initial analysis with the community. We’ve examined close to one hundred OSS projects, and are especially interested in how open infrastructure projects manage collaboration and sustainability.
Libero Publisher: eLife’s New Initiative to Build a Collaborative, Modern and Modular Open-Source Publication Platform for the Research Community
Maël Plaine, eLife
Description: Libero Publisher is eLife’s modern and modular open-source platform to help content providers do more with everything they publish. The platform has evolved since development began in 2015 from an enabler of innovation for eLife’s own journal to a reusable, cutting-edge web-publishing platform, and to a community-driven platform for the publication and presentation of scholarly content.
The Libero Publisher community – which consists of anyone interested in using, discussing, influencing or contributing to Libero Publisher – is currently composed of the following organisations in addition to eLife: the Coko Foundation (a non-profit organisation building open-source solutions for publishers), Hindawi (a multi-journal open-access publisher) and Digirati (a service and software company). We have adopted a governance strategy for Libero Publisher that will allow it to cater to the needs of a wide variety of organisations while we continue to build a robust core product and maintain the vision of an open infrastructure that fosters open access to scholarly resources. We believe university libraries could become an active part of Libero Publisher’s early-adopter community.
Conscious of the fact that some organisations may not have the IT resources to implement the platform, eLife is also working to build a healthy and diverse ecosystem of service providers for Libero Publisher’s users. We will work with them to ensure their services are reasonably priced and that they are knowledgeable of data migrations, implementations, integrations with other systems and so on.
During this short presentation, we would like to demo the first iteration of our Libero platform. We will also present a use case of a simple journal which recently adopted Libero. Future iterations of the software will support more complex journals and we will take this opportunity to showcase the platform’s high-level roadmap. Finally, we will explain how to take part in this journey or simply stay updated on Libero’s progress.