Software and interoperability

Software and interoperability

/ Mon, 11/04/2024 - 09:59

Abstract

In scholarly publishing, an ideal online publishing infrastructure should support workflows from manuscript submission, through peer review, to content display. Although building a fully professional platform is a challenge, institutional publishers and service providers can use a number of free and open-source software packages that offer out-of-the-box functionalities and make it possible to create an interoperable publishing venue.

Main Text

In scholarly publishing, an ideal online publishing infrastructure should support publishing workflows from manuscript submission, through peer review, to content display. Such a platform makes it easier for publishers to handle documentation – manuscripts, reviews and correspondence – and to archive what needs to be preserved, preventing data and documentation loss in case of major changes in the editorial team. It also makes it possible to display the information about the publisher and their published outputs, as well as to feature each article or chapter on a dedicated landing page and enable straightforward and easy searching and navigation between articles or chapters and their source publications (journals or books) via a table of contents, menus and links. 

Along with displaying content for human readers, the publishing platform should be able to display the metadata describing publications and their subunits in line with widely adopted metadata schemas (e.g. Dublin Core, DataCite, Crossref, JATS XML for journals / ONIX, MARC for books, etc.), via standard protocols for metadata exchange (Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting – OAI-PMH, REST API, HTTPS, etc.), so that general search engines (e.g. Google, Google Scholar) and academic aggregators (e.g. OpenAIRE, CORE, BASE) can access, process and disseminate their metadata. Publishing platforms should also support massive metadata export (as CSV files, ONIX XML feeds or in any other established format) and provide metadata records to libraries (e.g. MARC).

Building a fully professional publishing platform that has all these functionalities from scratch may seem an unattainable goal. However, thanks to the availability of free and open-source (FOSS) solutions, such as Open Journal Systems, Janeway, Kotahi, PubSweet  for journals (Lutz et al., 2023), and Open Monograph Press, PubPub, Manifold, Fulcrum, Scalar, etc. for books (Adema et al., 2022), institutional publishers and service providers are able to establish fully functional publishing platforms enabling them to carry out editorial and publishing workflows according to high professional standards and best practices (Baker, 2020). Not only do the mentioned solutions offer out-of-the-box functionalities that can fairly easily be enriched with free add-ons, but they are also designed and maintained by non-profit organisations and communities who seek to provide sufficient documentation and support knowledge exchange through forum discussions. Keeping this in mind, institutional publishers and service providers should contribute to the community efforts whenever possible, by sharing the code of any new add-ons they may have developed. 

To support Diamond OA, in some countries shared infrastructures based on free and open-source software are maintained at the national level and offered to institutional publishers on the software-as-a-service basis free of charge (e.g. HRCAK in Croatia, ePublishing EKT in Greece, Openjournals.nl in the Netherlands, PubIN in  Portugal, Recyt in  Spain, Online Scholarly Journals in Finland etc.). 

The publishing platform should conform to current interoperability standards (OpenAIRE Guidelines, KBART, COUNTER), accessibility guidelines (e.g. W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – WCAG) and open science principles, and it should be regularly updated and backed up. Publishers should strive to use free and open-source software as much as possible in their editorial and publishing workflows (Maxwell et al., 2019). Technical interoperability should be supported by appropriate policies allowing metadata distribution under the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication licence and text and data mining (automatic downloading, extraction and indexing of the full texts and the associated metadata).


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References

Further reading

  • Armengou, C., Edig, X. van ., Laakso, M., & Umerle, T. (2023). CRAFT-OA Deliverable 3.1 report on standards for best publishing practices and basic technical requirements in the light of FAIR principles (Draft). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8112662
  • Barthonnat, C., Blotière, E., Gingold, A., Mas, F.-X., Stanić, N., Pierno, A., Szulińska, A., Armando, L., Pochet, B., de Santis, L., MacGregor, J., Pozzo, R., & Pogačnik, A. (2021). OPERAS SIG on Tools for Open Scholarly Communication: White Paper 2021. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5654319

 

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This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


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