Open Access News

Cornell University has something exciting in the works for readers and small publishers of academic journals, conference proceedings, and other scholarly works. To help institutions organize and publish material inexpensively - and therefore to maximize access - a team at the University Library is developing DPubS, an open-source electronic publishing platform. "Libraries have to buy scholarship from publishers," says David Ruddy, Head of Systems Development and Production at Cornell University Library's Center for Innovative Publishing. "Prices keep rising, and library budgets can't match the increase" - a predicament known to librarians as "the serials crisis." Not that DPubS is intended to put commercial publishers out of business. According to Tom Hickerson, Associate University Librarian at Cornell, "Our goal is not to compete directly with commercial academic publishers, but to provide alternatives. We want to give lower-cost journals access to cutting-edge functionality, while maintaining lower prices and open access distribution."

DPubS is open source and will be freely available....It originated in the Dienst system, a distributed digital library system developed by Cornell's Computer Science department in the mid-1990s. A few years later, recognizing the value of the code, employees at the University Library began to explore ways to use it as a platform for digital collections. In 2000, the Library decided to use this system, renamed DPubS, as the basis for Project Euclid, a Cornell-based electronic publishing initiative for math and statistics scholarly literature. Based on that success, the group applied in July 2004 for sufficient funding to make the software usable by other institutions. Generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has allowed the team to enhance the earlier versions of DPubS, transforming it into an innovative general-purpose publishing platform. The Cornell University Library team continues to develop the software, in partnership with the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and Press, who are helping to test and refine the system. Final release of the product is expected this year. The released version will support peer review, have extensive administrative functionality, and provide interoperability with open-source institutional repository systems such as DSpace and Fedora....Summing up, librarian Hickerson says, "DPubS is part of an effort by research libraries to be present at the creation of scholarly literature, rather than just acting as repositories. We may have a new publishing paradigm beginning to evolve, economically as well as functionally." Ruddy agrees. "There's a perceived need for a lower-cost, academically-owned marketplace for scholarship. DPubS is one such initiative. The hope is that it will be a catalyst for change in scholarly communications."