The University of California’s open access publishing program and institutional repository, eScholarship, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. As part of this celebration of the many ways eScholarship has enabled UC affiliated scholars and editors to openly share their research and publications with the world over the past two decades, we’ve taken some time to examine the nuts and bolts of our services, which have grown organically as we’ve expanded and adapted to support the changing needs of the scholarly community and the reading public. Looking under the hood, we find that, while eScholarship is still a powerful and flexible platform, the underlying technology is somewhat outdated, with many bespoke core components.
Looking ahead, the eScholarship team is eager to address this issue of aging and idiosyncratic technology by engaging more fully with leading open source, community-based solutions–both as a consumer of and contributor to these efforts. This desire has motivated our participation in an exciting new initiative, the Next Generation Library Publishing Project (NGLP), funded by Arcadia and focused on building interoperable tools to connect widely adopted, open source platforms and services. With library publishers specifically in mind, NGLP has created discovery, access, administrative, and analytics/reporting layers designed to work with powerful applications like the journal publishing platforms Janeway and OJS, and the repository platform DSpace–providing combined publishing and institutional repository solutions. The project is currently piloting this modular technology approach to gather feedback from stakeholders.
As one of the pilot partners, CDL is excited to engage the eScholarship community in evaluating this early iteration of a next generation publishing and institutional repository solution. We will host a series of webinars throughout July demonstrating an early version of the NGLP stack, configured for and populated with journal and repository data from two UC campuses. Participants will be able to tour and interact with the pilot implementation, including journal and repository submission workflows and the NGLP Web Delivery Platform (WDP), the last of which provides a unified display layer across multiple content platforms. We will be particularly focused on the presentation of content and related publishing entities, in order to learn what our stakeholders find compelling, confusing, and where the gaps are at this early stage. This feedback will be shared with the NGLP project team as they work to build out a fully realized offering.
This will be a unique chance to share your thoughts about the most significant ways library publishers can support your open access publishing and repository activities. Sign up for the upcoming webinar on Thursday August 4th, 2-2:50pm PT, to help shape this community-led publishing solution and provide input on where eScholarship should go next. Invitations to an additional dedicated session for our library partners will be sent soon.
Tags: CDL, eScholarship, NGLP
