This post, celebrating 25 years and collaborating for the future, is part of the inaugural issue of PKP’s Newsletter, “Archipelago”.
This last year, we proudly celebrated the Public Knowledge Project’s 25th Anniversary. We’re in good company, as a number of open infrastructures also commemorated significant milestones last year. As we reflect on the remarkable journey that has brought us to being the choice for more than 34,000 journals worldwide, we’re also envisioning a future where we can foster a more robust, diverse, and inclusive scholarly publishing archipelago. This means deeper engagement, cooperation and collaboration, continued work on building seamless interoperability across different open infrastructures, and being keenly aware of the progress and needs of our communities.
In recognition of our collective efforts to realize this shared vision and mission, we’d like to shine a spotlight on some of the ways we’re collaborating to enhance interoperability between foundational open infrastructures, and our valued strategic partners.
Coalition Publica: Érudit and PKP working together
Coalition Publica is a vital alliance to advance research efforts, dissemination, and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. This partnership between Érudit and PKP is dedicated to aiding the Social Sciences and Humanities journal community as it navigates the journey towards sustainable open access in Canada and beyond. Érudit, in parallel with PKP, is also celebrating a quarter-century as a leader dedicated to this cause.
Together, we collaborate on several fundamental initiatives to provide support, and foster positive change. An essential part of this partnership is an integration between the Open Journal Systems (OJS) and erudit.org platforms enabled by the development of OJS plugins to transfer JATS XML via OAI-PMH, as well as the development of production tools to process JATS XML within Érudit’s workflows.
Our teams also collaborate on outreach and education initiatives that support and advance high quality, multilingual, open access publishing, including a recent bilingual French and English webinar on the “Informed Use of Multilingualism in PKP Software”.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
Last year, the DOAB, led by OpenEdition and the OAPEN Foundation, celebrated a decade of commitment to enhancing the discoverability of peer-reviewed open access books. As an indexing service, DOAB relies on high quality metadata to accomplish its goals.
PKP and DOAB are joining forces to enhance the accessibility, interoperability and visibility of open books published with PKP’s Open Monograph Press (OMP) by establishing a working group to explore the development of a plugin to more seamlessly push metadata from OMP-using publishers to the DOAB and vice versa.
Following an initial meeting between PKP and DOAB at the PKP Copenhagen Sprint (#pkpcph2023), the OMP-DOAB Integration Working Group was formed, and its inaugural meeting took place on September 6th, 2023.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
The DOAJ, celebrating 20 years last year, is the trusted source for a community-curated list of open access journals. The DOAJ and PKP have a history of collaboration, exemplified by our partnership on Project JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER).
This initiative, conducted in conjunction with Internet Archive, CLOCKSS, and Keepers Registry, addresses the challenge of journals vanishing from the internet due to resource constraints and lack of awareness around preservation. Its primary focus is the long-term preservation of open access journals.
Together, PKP and DOAJ have also developed educational materials, including the DOAJ Application Guide for OJS Journals, and have developed tools to transfer vital information from OJS-using journals to the DOAJ. Once OJS journals are indexed by DOAJ, they can export journal issues and article metadata to DOAJ manually using the DOAJ Export Plugin or automatically through the DOAJ API.
Recently, at #pkpcph2023, PKP and DOAJ convened to discuss enhancing interoperability between OJS-using journals and the DOAJ indexing process. This meeting sought to explore how OJS can streamline applications to DOAJ through plugins and similar tools while identifying essential requirements for such plugins. Our collaboration continues with regularly scheduled meetings between our teams.
For more information, access PKP’s News Blog – PKP Copenhagen 2023 sprint notes released: DOAJ / PKP collaborative opportunities.
The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC)
The LPC celebrates its 10th anniversary during its current program year (July 2023 – June 2024), and PKP is delighted to be acknowledged as an LPC Strategic Affiliate. PKP, along with LPC, NASIG, and BlueSky to BluePrint, collaborated on the 2018 Library Publishing Curriculum. The initiative was funded by an IMLS grant, and aimed at enhancing educational resources in library-based publishing.
The PKP School’s Getting Started in Library Publishing course is based on the Library Publishing Curriculum. An updated version of this curriculum is scheduled for release in this year and will be incorporated into relevant PKP School modules.
ORCiD
ORCiD celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2022, and PKP is thrilled to announce its successful grant application for ORCiD’s 2023 Global Participation Fund (GPF). The GPF’s Community Development and Outreach Program is specifically crafted to offer support to local partners in regions that have been underrepresented, with the primary aim of nurturing the growth of ORCiD Communities of Practice.
This grant empowers PKP to extend its support to Indonesian scholarly publishing communities with a focus on two objectives. First, PKP will engage in close collaboration with Indonesian universities, government bodies, and publishing representatives to establish sustainable ORCiD Global Participation Fund memberships. These memberships have the potential to encompass a significant portion of Indonesia’s almost 15,000 OJS-using journals.
Additionally, PKP will adopt a train-the-trainer model to enhance the technical capabilities of the Indonesian OJS-using community, facilitating the upgrading of OJS installations to the long-term support (LTS) version of OJS. This initiative deepens our ongoing relationship, for example, through the interoperability enabled through the ORCiD Plugin. On this point, an event was held for the OJS-ORCiD User Community of Indonesia on December 13th, 2023.
For more information, access the GPF announcement on PKP’s News Blog.
Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO)
SciELO, a PKP Development Partner, celebrated their 25th year of dedicated service to the scholarly publishing community by enhancing peer-reviewed journals across a range of disciplines, particularly in Latin America. Together, and building on the successful collaboration that led to the release of Open Preprint Systems (OPS), PKP and SciELO have co-developed a roadmap for fundamental improvements to the OJS, OMP, and OPS workflows.
This roadmap has already resulted in an overhauled author submission process in all three applications, leading to a friendly experience for authors. The next round of major improvements will focus on the editor’s submission lists, probably the single most complex and frequently used element in the software’s scholarly workflow. PKP is grateful for SciELO’s contributions of both financial support and editorial expertise, which have been crucial to recent progress. Please visit SciELO’s Blog, “In Perspective”, to learn more about our relationship.
In Summary
These partnerships provide a glimpse into the intricate web, or “archipelago,” of interdependence, interoperability, and the pivotal role played by PKP as a vital open infrastructure, as described by JISC. The ecosystem of open infrastructure, like all ecosystems, is sustained through complex interdependencies that we are proud to be a part of and nurture. We’ve shared some of our most recent collaborations here. For more information about all our partners, please visit PKP’s Strategic Partners Page.
Jump to other newsletter sections
📌 Welcome to PKP’s Newsletter, Archipelago!
📌 Country feature: ORCID and OJS in Indonesia
📌 An update to PKP Member structure
📌 PKP announces new Development Partnership with Sachsenkonsortium
