DiPP and eLanguage: Two cooperative models for open access

Abstract

This article describes the development, deployment and ongoing use of two collaborative platforms for the publication of peerreviewed, open access, academic ejournals and the different organizational environments towards which each system is tailored. The two projects presented here, DiPP [1] and eLanguage [2], are examples of different approaches to electronic publishing: the first being a regional publishing cooperative, the second a disciplinary one [3]. Our description includes the technical specifications of the DiPP platform, which is an extension of the Plone [4] content management system and Fedora [5], and eLanguage, which is based on the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems (OJS) [6] and the blogging platform Wordpress [7]. The authors hope to convincingly illustrate how very specific factors both technical and cultural shape the requirements of those who work with different publishing products and that these factors must be carefully reviewed when building a publishing cooperative. We also wish to emphasize the importance of bringing together researchers, scholarly societies and libraries in a joint effort to create the ideal environment for open access. Scholarly societies in particular can act as influential stewards for the proliferation of open access due to their reach and the trust they enjoy, and therefor bringing them aboard is of critical importance [8].


Notes

1. See http://www.dipp.nrw.de/.

2. See http://elanguage.net/.

3. We owe the term publishing cooperative to Raym Crow of SPARC, who held a presentation outlining the concept at the First PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver on 12 July 2007. The presentation slides are available at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp2007/index.php/pkp/1/paper/view/79/33. See also Raym Crow, 2006. Publishing cooperatives: An alternative for nonprofit publishers, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) Discussion Paper, at http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers.html; see also version in First Monday, volume 11, number 9 (September), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/crow/.

4. See http://plone.org/.

5. See http://www.fedoracommons.org/. Note that this repository system is not to be confused with the Linux distribution of the same name.

6. See http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs.

7. See http://wordpress.org/.

8. See Veltrop (2003) and Waltham (2006) for a discussion of open access in relation to scholarly societies.