3 open source tools for scientific publishing | Opensource.com

"One industry that lags behind others in the adoption of digital or open source tools is the competitive and lucrative world of scientific publishing. Worth over £19B ($26B) annually, according to figures published by Stephen Buranyi in The Guardian last year, the system for selecting, publishing, and sharing even the most important scientific research today still bears many of the constraints of print media. New digital-era technologies present a huge opportunity to accelerate discovery, make science collaborative instead of competitive, and redirect investments from infrastructure development into research that benefits society.

The non-profit eLife initiative was established by the funders of research, in part to encourage the use of these technologies to this end. In addition to publishing an open-access journal for important advances in life science and biomedical research, eLife has made itself into a platform for experimentation and showcasing innovation in research communication—with most of this experimentation based around the open source ethos.

Working on open publishing infrastructure projects gives us the opportunity to accelerate the reach and adoption of the types of technology and user experience (UX) best practices that we consider important to the advancement of the academic publishing industry. Speaking very generally, the UX of open source products is often left undeveloped, which can in some cases dissuade people from using it. As part of our investment in OSS development, we place a strong emphasis on UX in order to encourage users to adopt these products.

All of our code is open source, and we actively encourage community involvement in our projects, which to us means faster iteration, more experimentation, greater transparency, and increased reach for our work.

The projects that we are involved in, such as the development of Libero (formerly known as eLife Continuum) and the Reproducible Document Stack, along with our recent collaboration with Hypothesis, show how OSS can be used to bring about positive changes in the assessment, publication, and communication of new discoveries...."