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Cornell and Penn State Universities

The Development of an Open Source Publishing System

by Terry Ehling, Director of Electronic Publishing at Cornell University Library.  Prior to her Cornell appointment, she was Manager of the Digital Projects Lab at the MIT Press.

The internet timeline is short and frenetic.  The net has spawned occult acronyms, stupendous commercial failures, and now—for those of us who commerce in scholarly journals and monographs at the shallow end of the 21st century—many costly choices but few affordable options for the delivery of content.

In the less complicated 1990s university presses thought small and worked alone. The first books and journals to be distributed electronically had established marquee value in the mid-90s: The Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press) and The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (MIT) are often cited as examples of “greenfield” projects.

Technical innovations and economic pressures still cast a long shadow over the scholarly publishing community.  Readers’ and users’ appetites have become more sophisticated while the cost structures for managing and delivering book and especially journal content electronically have become far more complex.

Five years ago, the Cornell University Library submitted a proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the support of the design and deployment of a mechanism and environment for the on-line distribution of serial literature in mathematics and statistics.  Project Euclid was funded in 2000 and launched as a multi-model publishing service in early 2003.  Today Euclid delivers nearly 40 journals to libraries and individuals under subscription, hosting, or open access delivery plans.

Project Euclid's technology infrastructure is based on a modular digital library architecture and protocol developed at Cornell in the early 1990s.  The model developed by the Library from this early digital library instantiation is now known as DPubS (Digital Publishing System).  DPubS was designed specifically to organize, navigate, access, and deliver both open access and subscription controlled scholarly publications.  

This past spring Cornell University Library in partnership with the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and the Pennsylvania State University Press were awarded a $670,000 grant to generalize and enhance the DPubS system and release the resulting improved version of the software under an open source license.  The development goals for this project include:

1. Creation of a general purpose publishing platform
   
   • Redesign of the DPubS User Interface Service module to allow for the implementation of a scalable and extensible XML/XSLT architecture. This major upgrade to the system will provide a growing and diverse cohort of publishers with the flexibility to cost-effectively modify the look and feel of publication-specific pages and customize any related sub-components.
   • Redesign of underlying configuration and metadata services to support a full range of publishing entities and object types.
   • Enhance DPubS's capability to handle non-serial literature.
     
2. Provide on-line editorial management services to support “peer review” activities
   These services would provide a suite of document management tools for use by journal as well as monograph publishers.  Editorial management services might include: an on-line manuscript submission environment, with automated alerts; a reviewer database; multiple mechanisms for distributing papers to reviewers; a tool to collect and organize feedback from reviewers; a tool to track accepted papers through the editorial and composition process; sorting/queuing capabilities for organizing prospective journal issues; access mechanisms for forthcoming articles; and the ability to publish articles or entire issues by efficiently moving final copy from the editorial workspace to the public distribution space.
   
3. Enhance the administrative functionality and interface
   This work would rationalize production workflow, allowing greater segmentation of tasks and the creation of simple tools to manage lower-level processes (adding new publishers, adding new content, producing usage statistics, troubleshooting user login problems, answering mail, etc.).
   
4. Provide interoperability with institutional repository systems
   We anticipate broad interest from adopters of institutional repository systems, especially DSpace and Fedora, in providing electronic publishing services via DPubS. 
   

The first joint DPubS v.2 beta project between Cornell and Penn State will involve the delivery of Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, a publication of the Pennsylvania Historical Association, published by the Penn State University Press. Current and backfile content for this journal will be available in late 2005.

Penn State University Press has forged a strong alliance with the Penn State University Libraries ( see Learning to Work Together) and this signal relationship, supported by senior administration at the university, makes Penn State an ideal development partner for this initiative.

Cornell University Library is also working with its own Press to deliver digital editions of the Press’s prestigious Comstock Publishing Associates titles, a distinguished list of general interest handbooks and reference works in the life sciences and natural history.

The DPubS v.2 collaboration between Cornell and Penn State, while focusing primarily on technology developments, is also very much about establishing a framework for an intra-institutional partnership between university presses and libraries.  The project’s overarching agenda involves fostering a community that will support the on-going development of an open source publishing system, and exploring sustainable business models for scholarly publishing activities within the academy.  

Presses and libraries can leverage each other’s strengths.  Together they can offer a broad range of sophisticated, cost-effective publishing services to their communities.  Our hope is that DPubS v.2 and the collaboration that will deliver this system to the stakeholders in the scholarly communications ambit, will result in a blueprint for vigorous alternative publishing and distribution programs.

[A panel discussion on library-press collaborations and status report on DPubS v.2 developments is scheduled for the 2005 AAUP Annual Meeting in Philadephia.

References:

Project Euclid: Mathematics and Statistics Journals On-line
http://projecteuclid.org

DPubS
http://dpubs.org/