eScholarship pilots new technologies - Office of Scholarly Communication

"The University of California’s open access publishing program and institutional repository, eScholarship, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. As part of this celebration of the many ways eScholarship has enabled UC affiliated scholars and editors to openly share their research and publications with the world over the past two decades, we’ve taken some time to examine the nuts and bolts of our services, which have grown organically as we’ve expanded and adapted to support the changing needs of the scholarly community and the reading public.  Looking under the hood, we find that, while eScholarship is still a powerful and flexible platform, the underlying technology is somewhat outdated, with many bespoke core components.   Looking ahead, the eScholarship team is eager to address this issue of aging and idiosyncratic technology by engaging more fully with leading open source, community-based solutions–both as a consumer of and contributor to these efforts. This desire has motivated our participation in an exciting new initiative, the Next Generation Library Publishing Project (NGLP), funded by Arcadia and focused on building interoperable tools to connect widely adopted, open source platforms and services.  With library publishers specifically in mind, NGLP has created discovery, access, administrative, and analytics/reporting layers designed to work with powerful applications like the journal publishing platforms Janeway and OJS, and the repository platform DSpace–providing combined publishing and institutional repository solutions. The project is currently piloting this modular technology approach to gather feedback from stakeholders....