DPubS Planning Meeting Executive Summary

DPubS

DPubS Planning Conference

Executive Summary
October 2004

Cornell University Library has initiated a project, supported in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to develop an open source publication management system in conjunction with Pennsylvania State University that will provide authors and publishers with a more affordable way to publish scholarly research.

This project builds on the development of DPubS, software developed between 2000 and 2003 to support Project Euclid, a database of mathematics and statistics journals. It will now be enhanced and extended as a general purpose platform to support electronic publishing of scholarly literature in diverse disciplines. The enhanced version of DPubS will support peer review, have extensive administrative functionality and will provide interoperability with other open source repository systems such as Fedora and DSpace.

Cornell University Library is collaborating with the University Libraries and the University Press at Pennsylvania State University to test and refine DPubS. A group of 43 participants from 16 academic libraries and university presses from 5 countries gathered at Cornell University on October 19-20, 2004 to discuss the planned development, provide feedback on their requirements and explore how they might participate in the process.

Development Agenda
DPubS (Digital Publishing System) is the name for a set of software modules developed at Cornell to meet a range of electronic publishing needs: access, navigation and delivery of full-text content in a variety of file formats; subscription access controls; e-commerce services (pay-per-view); automated lookup and linking to other information resources (DOI registration, OAI compatibility, reference linking); usage statistics for publishers and institutional subscribers and appropriate safeguards against automated downloading of resources.
Modifications to the DPubS software include:

Creation of a general purpose platform:

° Redesign of the DPubS User Interface Service module to allow for the implementation of a scalable and extensible XML/XSLT architecture.

° Redesign of the underlying configuration and metadata services to support a full range of publishing entities and object types.

° Enhancement of DPubS’s capability to handle non-serial literature.

Enhancing the administrative functionality and interface.
Providing on-line editorial management services to support “peer review” activities.
Creating the ability to interoperate with Institutional Repositories.

By summer of 2006, DPubS is expected to be available as open source software to those interested in supporting publishing functions.

Recurring Discussion Themes
One of the objectives for the meeting was to engage the support of institutions interested in participating during the development cycle to insure that the system met their expectations. The following topics were raised in the discussions over two days as the participants considered implementing the software to meet their needs locally.

Who is the audience and what is their role?

° The existing audience included librarians and university press participants. Authors and readers were acknowledged as important stakeholders whose input should be sought on necessary features, the development of the interface and the peer review module.

° The goal of DPubS is to both support current needs and to introduce innovation.

° Requirements will vary based on the intended audience, which could include academic libraries, university presses, and scholarly societies. This will affect the need for various formats, print on demand, proceedings and other features.

° Libraries are interested in developing publishing capabilities to offer options in the current scholarly publishing environment.

° Libraries are beginning conversations with their faculty who author/review articles and author/edit books. They are exploring this new role and defining requirements in the broader context that also includes institutional repositories.

° Collaborative initiatives between libraries and their university presses represent an institutional level investment in the infrastructure required to support faculty research.

° Systems can be developed to accommodate existing variations, but can also seek to inspire efficiencies that offer cost savings to the press and shorten the time from manuscript submission to publication.

How should stakeholders be involved?

° It became increasingly clear that authors and editors as stakeholders needed to be further involved in the development of the peer review module.

° The University of Rochester Libraries have on staff an anthropologist who observes and defines user needs in light of their applications. This can be done in parallel with DPubS development and a schedule can be developed that will coordinate research results throughout the design phase beginning with the Alpha and Beta modes.

Need to provide for multiple formats.

° Although the grant focuses on journal literature, DPubS must be designed with other formats in mind such as conference papers, monographs, monographic series, technical reports, author controlled items, and perhaps theses and dissertations.
° Some libraries are responsible for their archives and dissertations. One of the challenges facing libraries is the question of how many systems they must support or can their larger systems be adapted to serve the broader range of requirements, thereby reducing the IT load.
° Faculty want multimedia and update capabilities in an institutional repository. These features are not typically part of the journal publication process.

Peer Review is both essential and optional.

° Peer review is expected by faculty and is an essential part of the system even if it isn’t used for all formats.

° This module needs to be developed with input from authors, reviewers, and editors so that it is viewed as advantageous for them to use.

° Peer review will remain an optional module based on the publication cycle and workflow procedures established by the publisher.

° Commercial systems are being examined by Duke University Press. BioOne is also exploring the feasibility of deploying a peer review utility. Both will share their analysis. This data will be useful in determining desired features and capabilities.

° The costs of file conversions are high for those publishers handling them and the group was advised to avoid incurring these costs.

° Peer Review consists of tracking the circulation of documents rather than attempting to deal with copyediting functions.

° DPubS should be flexible in the sequence of when an article is displayed, for example, before or after it is edited.

° The Peer Review module needs to include an e-mail utility to facilitate communication with authors.

° Authors should be provided with alternative submission channels, i.e. posting to a web form or delivery via e-mail.

Printing and print-on-demand may be required.

° More than one institution felt that the ability to print & bind longer works, via short runs or PoD, would be advantageous.

° Digital rights management was also raised as part of this discussion.

° DPubS should support e-commerce in the form of subscriptions and print-on-demand.

° The user should be able to decide what portions of an electronic file they wish to print.

° Small publishers may look to the press to offer reduced printing costs as part of a larger contract.

Institutional/Digital repositories are evolving.

° DPubS should be interoperable with both DSpace and Fedora, as well as other open source repository systems.

° Some libraries are responsible for archiving dissertations, which DPubS can handle.

° Libraries varied in their interest for DPubS to address archiving issues.

° A digital or electronic repository should be able to handle multiple formats, across disciplines and with varied applications.

° DPubS can serve as a repository with a publishing front end.

Metadata

° Creating metadata is time-consuming and while institutions may wish to reuse theirs, this will not always be feasible. There will be cases when previously created metadata is no longer compliant with current and evolving standards.

° Author generated metadata is often incomplete or ill-formed.

° Metadata created by libraries or university presses for on-line journal projects ideally should be OAI-compliant and compatible with repository requirements.

Need for Community/open source going forward.

° Since DPubS is being developed as open source software, it needs

a community infrastructure to provide support and contribute to the ongoing development agenda.

° The requirement to support Unicode applies for stakeholders in Asia and Europe. There is also a need for bilingual interfaces. It’s possible that this could be addressed in the open source phase of DPubS and/or with collaboration with Greenstone.

Shorter timeline desired.

° Several participants were eager to proceed more quickly and hoped the software might be available sooner. Some institutions are using commercial software until the open source code is available.

Conclusion
The Planning Meeting offered the opportunity for those interested in the software to share their requirements and consider how they could participate in the development process. The modular design of DPubS supports open source development and allows users the option of adopting different components because each module is functionally independent. This session provided an excellent forum to launch discussions and begin laying the foundation for future development and implementation.

Compiled and authored by
October Ivins and Judy Luther
Informed Strategies
December 2004