Digits receives $60,000 grant to help scholars publish work - The Tartan

"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh an 18-month-long $60,000 grant to support a project known as “Digits.” ...The aim of Digits is to optimize the software containers used in publishing scholarly research in order to make it easier and cheaper for scholars to publish their work and maintain it....“Hosting costs, maintenance, peer review, and preservation for non-traditional publications almost always fall upon the original authors; the equivalent duties for print scholarship, instead, are taken up by publishers, libraries, or scholarly organizations,” said the leaders of the project in a co-interview over email with The Tartan....The current digital publication system can lead to issues such as link rot, which happens when scholars change web hosts or let subscriptions expire, making the publications no longer available. “The responsibility of digital preservation needs to be shifted from individual researchers to journal publishers or university archives,” said Lavin in a university press release. Another feature of the project will allow scholars to update their work more easily. “It is often considered double-dipping or even cheating to publish nearly identical research as more data becomes available,” Weingart said in the press release. Thus, the leaders plan to incorporate an update feature into the software infrastructure they develop...."