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DPubS (Digital Publishing System), developed by Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries, is a free open access publication management software. DPubS arose out of Project Euclid, an electronic publishing platform for journals in mathematics and statistics. [1] DPubS is free software released under Educational Community License. [2]
Cornell University Library has been involved in digital publishing dates since the 1980s. In partnership with the Xerox Corporation and the Commission on Preservation and Access, Cornell developed an early digital imaging project to preserve books in a fragile condition. [3] Initially focused upon republishing mathematics titles, this effort expanded to include projects in agricultural history, home economics and American studies. [1]
The Serials crisis in the 1980s and 1990s likely encouraged Cornell University Library and other academic libraries and institutions to investigate such possibilities. In the 1980s libraries noticed that their journal subscription prices were increasing alarmingly. [4] By the early 1990s, many solutions were being explored, with cancellations being significant among them; in one case, LSU cancelled $650,000 in subscriptions in 1992-93. [5] Other alternatives emerged, however, involving the use of new technologies – such as those that enabled Cornell's digital imaging project – and the increasing availability of the Internet.
One such method of increasing access, Project MUSE, was initiated by Johns Hopkins University Press. Initially, Project Muse was intended to allow electronic access to titles published by Johns Hopkins University Press, but it has expanded to include the “full text of more than 300 journals from 60 different publishing groups worldwide." [6] Another such project, developed by Cornell University Library and influenced by Project Muse, is Project Euclid, an electronic gathering of mathematics and statistics journals. [7] As of 2005 it was delivering “40 journals to libraries and individuals under subscription, hosting, or open access delivery plans." [8] Project Euclid was developed out of the code used to create NCSTRL, “a distributed network of Computer Science technical reports” in Cornell's Computer Science department. [9] It offers an opportunity for “low-cost independent and society journals” to take advantage of the benefits of inclusion in an online database “without sacrificing their intellectual or economic independence or commitment to low subscription prices." [10] Several pricing options are available: Euclid Prime (EP), Euclid Select (ES), Euclid Direct (ED), and Open Access (OA). [11]
Developed with the help of two grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Project Euclid, named after ancient mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, launched in 2003. [1] As did their experience developing the digital imaging project, Project Euclid afforded Cornell University Library the opportunity to learn a great deal. Specifically, the library discovered much about functioning as a digital press that it was previously unfamiliar with, such as “marketing or handling subscription requests . . . editorial management procedures and the ability to negotiate contracts with journal owners." [1] While Euclid has been successful thus far – reported as “healthy and growing” in early 2006 – Cornell's heavy investment in the project and the ever-changing nature of the academic journal field where “sustainability is a moving target” has led to the exploration of other publishing avenues. [1]
Another initiative with relevance to the development of DPubS, arXiv, came to Cornell along with its initial developer Paul Ginsparg in 2001. [1] Institutional repositories, which serve as a central database of scholarly work such as preprints and postprints of journal articles, have become increasingly popular: OpenDOAR, an online directory of open access repositories, has shown an increase from 350 to 850 repositories included in its database since mid-2006. [12] Use of arXiv has been described as “intense,” averaging about 4,000 submissions per month in 2005. [1] Though many repositories – including all of those listed in OpenDOAR – are open access, they “have not substituted for traditional publications, and thus have not had a substantial impact on the journals pricing situation." [1] However, the success of open access repositories such as arXiv could indicate a growing willingness on the part of scholars to make use of non-traditional methods of publishing for their work.
Apart from Cornell's own desire to inquire further into unconventional approaches to publishing, there was an additional motivator. One of the results of the release of Project Euclid was interest in the software used to produce it. Cornell decided that they would eventually release this software, renaming it DPubS, but that it needed further development in order to be utilized by others. [7] It was in 2004 that the Pennsylvania State University Libraries became involved – expressing interest in the software that was used to develop Project Euclid – and the first project in developing DPubS was making available the journal Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. [8] This journal has been published since 1934 and is an official publication of the Pennsylvania Historical Association (PHA). [13]
The software was last updated on 2013-04-02. [14]
Also in 2004, Terry Ehling, the Director of the Center for Innovative Publishing at Cornell University Library addressed four goals for developing the software used to create Project Euclid into DPubS. These goals included: broadening the software's applicability by expanding its flexibility, including improving its ability to be used for monographs and other “non-serial literature”; “provide on-line editorial management services to support ‘peer review’ activities”; further developing “the administrative functionality and interface”; and “provide interoperability with institutional repository systems." [8] Furthermore, the DpubS website states the following as the development goals of Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries: “generalizing the platform beyond a single discipline and document format (serials); adding administrative interfaces for non-technical staff; allowing a level of interoperability between DPubS and institutional repository systems, specifically Fedora and DSpace and developing editorial services to support the peer review process.”
DPubS has been designed with the opinion that “libraries should get involved in publishing." [9] As mentioned above, the traditional model of journal publication and the dissemination of scholarly information has been through those titles published by commercial publishers. Furthermore, due to issues of profitability, an increasing amount of scholarship does not get printed. [9] Over time, the reputations of scholars have become strongly linked with the appearance of their work in these journals to the exception of publications outside of the commercial realm. Some groups of scholars initially reacted to Project Euclid in a “skittish” manner due to concerns over the unfamiliar nature of its model. [1] The creators of DPubS believe that libraries are uniquely positioned to play an important role in shifting the status quo, and that efforts such as Project Muse, Project Euclid, arXiv, DPubS and other endeavors represent the kind of efforts that can be made by libraries and university presses to combat the challenges rising journal prices have presented to their budgets.
DPubS aims to contain the “cycle of knowledge creation and dissemination . . . within the academy and its close collaborators” in order to have a significant impact on academic publishing. [1] The program “encourage[s]” libraries to take up a new role with new responsibilities in order to combat some of the print-leaning developments in the accessibility of scholarship over the past several decades. [15] Its developers hope it will help to increase access through electronic publishing by offering for free software that could easily cost six figures “for the initial licensing." [7]
After two years of development, DPubS was released in November 2006, also thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. [16] Its user interface utilizes XML (Extensible Markup Language) and XSLT (eXtensible Style Sheet Language Transformations), which enable adjustment for the design of web appearance for publications supported by DPubS. [16] Additionally, it has the following features: “scalable, single platform for electronic publishing,” allowing for the publication of several formats from one place; “rich presentation features,” due to the inclusion of XML; “multiple business models,” allowing both publications that are open access and those that are fee-based to utilize the software; “greater exposure and visibility of publications,” due to the use of OAI-MHP 2.0 (Open Access Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol) to allow metadata to be harvested from the content supported by DPubS and shared with users through services such as Google Scholar; “administrative management tools for non-technical staff”; “interoperability with institutional repositories” such as Fedora and DSpace (the latter forthcoming as of April 2007); “flexible and extensible handling of file and metadata formats,” allowing the easy use of PDFs, HTML, Microsoft Word files, PowerPoint presentations, etc.; and a “modular architecture allowing easy extension and customization. [9] As intended, the software used to develop Project Euclid has been expanded in order to encompass non-journal publications such as books and conference proceedings. [16] The DpubS software can also be adapted in order to be used with other formats. This aspect of DpubS results from its open-source nature, meaning that the software’s coding has been made available, enabling programmers to develop additions and modifications of the software for their own and others purposes. [16] While the administrative tools have been included, the editorial management services will wait for “future releases.” [16]
Towards the goal of further development, Cornell University Library and The Pennsylvania State University Libraries has partnered with several institutions that will be using DPubS and providing feedback. As of April 2007, these partners were: Australian National University, Bielefeld University – Germany, University of Kansas, University of Utah, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Vanderbilt University. [9] Along with Pennsylvania History mentioned above, other journals being supported by DPubS include: Medieval Philosophy and Theology, “a semi-annual, peer-reviewed journal . . . of medieval philosophy, including logic and natural science, and in medieval theology, including Christian, Jewish, and Islamic”; Indonesia, “a semi-annual journal published by the Cornell Southeast Asia Program . . . of Indonesia’s culture, history, government, economy, and society from 1966 to the present”; and Cornell Technical Reports and Papers, “a collection of publications from the Cornell Theory Center, the Cornell Computer Science Department, and other departments and units." [9]
Electronic publishing includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes the editing of books, journals, and magazines to be posted on a screen.
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal process to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable in the long term. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.
An institutional repository (IR) is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics. However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders. As a result academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.
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The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) is a web site managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies connecting information workers worldwide to build a global community of practice. Information management standards, tools and good practices can be found on AIMS:
Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from some 400 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.
SIMILE was a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and MIT CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project ran from 2003 to August 2008. It focused on developing tools to increase the interoperability of disparate digital collections. Much of SIMILE's technical focus is oriented towards Semantic Web technology and standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF).
SHERPA is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project.
A digital library is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.
Dryad is an international open-access repository of research data, especially data underlying scientific and medical publications. Dryad is a curated general-purpose repository that makes data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. The scientific, educational, and charitable mission of Dryad is to provide the infrastructure for and promote the re-use of scholarly research data.
D-Scribe Digital Publishing is an open access electronic publishing program of the University Library System (ULS) of the University of Pittsburgh. It comprises over 100 thematic collections that together contain over 100,000 digital objects. This content, most of which is available through open access, includes both digitized versions of materials from the collections of the University of Pittsburgh and other local institutions as well as original 'born-electronic' content actively contributed by scholars worldwide. D-Scribe includes such items as photographs, maps, books, journal articles, dissertations, government documents, and technical reports, along with over 745 previously out-of-print titles published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The digital publishing efforts of the University Library System began in 1998 and have won praise for their innovation from the leadership at the Association of Research Libraries and peer institutions.
The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a searchable international database indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southampton, UK, in 2003. It began as the Institutional Archives Registry and was renamed Registry of Open Access Repositories in 2006. To date, over 3,000 institutional and cross-institutional repositories have been registered.
An open repository or open-access repository is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such repositories must be interoperable according to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Search engines harvest the content of open access repositories, constructing a database of worldwide, free of charge available research. Data repositories are the cornerstone for FAIR data practices and are used expeditiously within the scientific community.
Project Euclid is a collaborative partnership between Cornell University Library and Duke University Press which seeks to advance scholarly communication in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics through partnerships with independent and society publishers. It was created to provide a platform for small publishers of scholarly journals to move from print to electronic in a cost-effective way.
The German National Library of Science and Technology, abbreviated TIB, is the national library of the Federal Republic of Germany for all fields of engineering, technology, and the natural sciences. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the 16 German states. Founded in 1959, the library operates in conjunction with the Leibniz Universität Hannover. In addition to acquiring scientific literature, it conducts applied research in such areas as the archiving of non-textual materials, data visualization and the future Internet. The library is also involved in a number of open access initiatives. With a collection of about 8.9 million items in 2012, the TIB is the largest technology and natural science library in the world.
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DiVA and is a digital repository that enables Swedish universities, university colleges, public authorities, research institutes and museums to collect and make publications openly available.