January 26, 2021

NGLP Releases “Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat)”

By Hannah Ballard

Have you ever needed to find a quick, concise description of an open source scholarly communication tool or service? Have you wished you had a way to compare and contrast scholarly communication tools and services based on features like their organization model, standards adoption, or dependencies? Welcome to our vision for the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat)!

Created by Antleaf, COAR, and the Next Generation Library Publishing project, SComCat is a catalogue and knowledge base of scholarly communications open technologies including software and some essential running services. SComCat’s purpose is to assist potential users in making decisions about which technologies they will adopt by providing an overview of the functionality, organizational models, dependencies, use of standards, and levels of adoption of each technology.

The scan includes tools, platforms, and standards that can be locally adopted to support one or more of the functions of the lifecycle of scholarly communication, which is conceptualized as including the following activities: creation, evaluation, publication, dissemination, preservation, and reuse. The initial data has been drawn from existing sources, including the Mind The Gap report (SFU, MIT)

If you know of a technology or platform that you think should be included in this scan, please use the feedback form located on the SComCat Contribute page.

About the Next Generation Library Publishing Project

The Next Generation Library Publishing project is led by  Educopia Institute, California Digital Library (CDL), and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos), in close partnership with LYRASIS, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and Longleaf Services. 

The project is generously funded by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Its purpose is to improve publishing pathways and choices for authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructure to support library publishers. In addition to developing interoperable publishing tools and workflows, our team is exploring how to create community hosting models that align explicitly and demonstratively with academic values.

More About SComCat

SComCat has been developed by Antleaf for the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) as part of the Next Generation Library Publishing Project.

The data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The SComCat software is built as open source software, licensed under an MIT License.