TIB becomes Major Development Partner of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)

diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

TIB will be working with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) in the future under a new partnership. As a Major Development Partner, TIB will contribute to the work of PKP both financially and through its own work, especially in software development. The partners also want to start new projects together. One focus is on the adaptation of Open Journal Systems for conference publications.

About PKP

Based at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, the Public Knowledge Project has been working since 1998 on approaches to open access to knowledge. Its most widely used offering is the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, which is used as an editorial system by many thousands of scholarly journals. PKP’s work is based on three pillars: 1. the development of free publication software, 2. research and information services, and 3. its own publication service. Currently PKP is in a phase of increasing networking between these three pillars and further development of its own organizational form (see Alperin et al., Reflections and Directions After PKP’s First Two Decades and MacGregor et al., The Public Knowledge Project: Open Source Tools for Open Access to Scholarly Communication).

New partnership

PKP and TIB will cooperate on many levels in the coming years. PKP is a key player for a sustainable and diverse open access landscape. In particular, the development of Open Journal Systems is important for the publication of open access journals under academic control, in different organisational configurations, and in many different languages. We support the work of PKP and the associated community through our collaboration and input. In doing so, we contribute the expertise of TIB as a national specialized library with innovative research and development interests and with a strong commitment to open access and open science. In particular, we plan to participate in these fields:

  • We will participate in the development of OJS – in coordination with PKP and focusing on areas where we can contribute TIB interests and expertise. This includes the adaptation of OJS for the publication of conference publications and the support of persistent identifiers.
  • For new tasks, we are exploring the possibility of joint projects.
  • Video recordings from the PKP International Scholarly Publishing Conferences should be made freely available and permanently published via the TIB AV Portal, our video repository.
  • We will be involved in the PKP Forum and contribute to software testing and documentation.

The new agreement makes TIB PKP’s first major collaborative partner outside of North America. We will work to leverage this partnership to strengthen and grow the European community as well.

Cooperation promotes open access and opens up new opportunities

Participating in the governance of PKP’s work by serving on PKP committees allows us to contribute our strengths as well as add European perspectives on open access, on the local academic and publishing landscape and its requirements. PKP’s international footprint and OJS’s global outreach contribute significantly to PKP’s success and appeal. For us, it is important that the PKP software is released as free software – not just gratis, but actually free for all to reuse, adapt, etc. At a time when critical infrastructure and important services for open access and for scholarly publishing are often without sustainable funding, and when non-free services are often used with little concern, we are consciously contributing to a better approach. The first public result of our development work is an OJS plugin to support the new ROR identifier to uniquely identify academic organizations (Demo).

In view of the worldwide movement towards open access with still strong regional differences, it will be exciting to see what opportunities for cooperation arise in new projects and ventures. In this regard, PKP and TIB share similar perspectives on sustainable open access funding (see, for example, our new KOALA project).

We will work to strengthen the PKP community. To this end, we will cooperate with other institutions that are also working, for example, on the German OJS community. We will share our expertise and contribute to the further development of a decentralized, diverse publishing landscape.

Use of Open Journal Systems at TIB

At TIB, we are currently launching TIB Open Publishing, a new publishing service for conference publications and journals. We have already reported on our motivation, the standards we are aiming for, and our technical approaches. In the meantime, we have successfully negotiated with the first conferences. On our own OJS-based service, we will be able to offer new features developed by us at an early stage. We will bring the experience gained from our own publishing activities to the collaboration with PKP, and our publishing practice will benefit from the close connection to PKP.

Information

... leitet den Bereich Publikationsdienste der TIB und koordiniert deren Open-Access-Aktivitäten.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5111-2788