Guest Post - Library Publishers Convene in Vancouver to Discuss Open Platforms and Open Educational Resources - The Scholarly Kitchen

"From May 8 to 10th of this year, about two hundred librarians, publishers, and all flavors in between gathered at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver for the 6th annual Library Publishing Coalition Forum. The Pre-Conference on Wednesday, May 8th, focused on Open Educational Resources, had about 90 attendees. The open theme carried over into the main event with presentations on open publishing platforms of many kinds.

Increased interest in open platforms and open tools has grown after continuing industry consolidation of hosting and authoring tools — namely, Wiley’s acquisition of the Atypon platform and the latter’s subsequent purchase of the Authoria and Manuscript tools, along with Elsevier’s shift in emphasis on the researcher workflow with acquisitions of the Mendeley Scholarly Collaboration Network, Aries’ Editorial Manager, and the institutional repository provider, Bepress. Many posts here in the Scholarly Kitchen have focused on this trend and highlighted concern of vendor lock-in, as well as smaller publisher concerns of being “locked out.” 

With so many open platforms in the mix today, one focal point of the meeting was SFU’s own John Maxwell, who presented preliminary findings from an environmental scan of open source publishing conducted by MIT Press and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (Full disclosure: I currently work for the MIT Knowledge Futures Group, but I had agreed to present at this meeting while still employed by the open annotation tool creator Hypothesis.)

With a full report scheduled for later this summer, Maxwell detailed the scope and process of the scan, which hopes to create a catalog of approximately 50 open source projects itemized with their main approaches, key partners, codebases, and more...."