December 1, 2020

NGLP Technical Development Directions and Request for Participation

By Kristen Ratan, Katherine Skinner, Catherine Mitchell

Following more than a year of research and engagement with library publishers, the Next Gen Library Publishing (NGLP) project is pleased to announce its technical development directions.

We are now commissioning the build of two components: a cross-content web delivery/discovery platform and a cross-platform administrative dashboard for journal publishing. These elements will be designed to help bridge journal publishing platforms (e.g., Open Journal Systems, Janeway) and repository platforms (e.g.,  DSpace). All of our work will be released with open source licenses, and we will be working directly with at least three service providers that plan to provide hosted publishing services based in part on this development work: California Digital Library, Longleaf Services, Inc., and LYRASIS. 

We hope to continue building strong partnerships with library publishers throughout this development phase, and we invite participation and feedback from all practitioners in library publishing and campus-based publishing efforts. Please sign up to participate.

Background

In August 2019, the Next Generation Library Publishing project was launched through a partnership of Educopia Institute, California Digital Library, and Stratos, and in close collaboration with LYRASIS, Longleaf, and COAR. Funded with generous support from Arcadia, the purpose of this 2.5 year project is to improve the publishing pathways and choices available to authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructures to support library and other campus-based publishing activities. 

In the first year of this project, the NGLP team conducted focus groups, workshops, interviews, and issued a “Request for Ideas” in order to identify the needs, challenges, and gaps experienced by more than 150 library publishing community members, including library publishers, university presses, tool developers, service providers, authors, and editors. We also held information sessions with seven open-source publishing platforms that align with our research findings, in order to evaluate their current offerings, roadmaps, and business/community models. 

Library publishers were clear and consistent about their needs. Across our array of communications and assessments, library publishers asked us to integrate existing open source content delivery and publishing platforms and to focus the project’s budget for software development on filling gaps and building out integrations. Library publishers also specified their need for mission-aligned yet affordable service providers to offer turnkey and supported solutions based on open infrastructure. Additional needs included better tools for multi-journal/consortial publishing, robust reporting across open source platforms, more advanced digital publishing, supporting infrastructure for metadata, and, finally, migration support to the new emerging hosted services that come from this effort. The library publishing community expressed a desire to begin with journal support and integrated journal and IR solutions, and then to expand from this strong foundation to include other types of publications in the future. 

The synthesized findings from the NGLP team’s varied research instruments and processes have now informed our technical development roadmap. Our goal is to offer the community a modular suite of platforms and components that can be combined flexibly to meet the needs of different stakeholder groups, depending on whether their need is a new journal solution or a combined IR and journal solution. 

NGLP will support the use of existing open source technologies by building two new components that 1) improve cross-content web delivery and discovery and 2) improve cross-platform data analysis. NGLP will also investigate how best to integrate existing and new tools and migrate early adopters onto the new architecture. A critical piece of the success of this project will be seeding an ecosystem of mission-aligned service providers as many library publishers do not want to host and run their own open source software. 

With this roadmap in mind, our next step is to commission the build of two software components.

1. The first component is the cross-content web delivery and discovery platform that can pull in content from journal manuscript submission systems such as OJS and Janeway, and combine it with content from other sources such as institutional repositories for a multi-leveled branding and content display and search.
2. The second component is a cross-platform administrative dashboard that pulls activity and usage data from multiple platforms and offers reports that offer insight into an institution’s publishing program. 

The initial open source platforms that NGLP will seek to integrate will be OJS and Janeway for journal editorial and production support, and DSpace for institutional repository support. Additional platforms and tools may be added and combined with the commissioned new component builds. 

NGLP is now entering into a rapid requirements discovery phase for the two components mentioned above. We are interested in community participation in this effort and are holding work sessions in December with follow-up working groups in early 2021.

We invite all practitioners in library and campus-based publishing to sign up to participate.