The CARPET (Community for Academic Reviewing, Publishing and Editorial Technology) project aims to develop an electronic platform where tools and services for electronic publishing can be systematically and clearly represented. This shall allow a more efficient use of existing tools and foster coordinated developments avoiding redundancies. [The project is]supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [for] the next two years....
The need for such a platform results from altered scientific communication within the evolving virtualization of media and working processes....Electronic publication via open access patterns is thereby an increasingly popular option.
A DFG survey and a subsequent workshop entitled „Development of Generic Publication Tools“ [11/23/06] are the initial points for the project. Given the current multitude of publication tools this revealed an urgent need for presenting existing approaches on an internet-based platform. The CARPET project will step-by-step create such an openly accessible platform. As a start a catalogue of existing tools will be generated which will be expanded to an information platform and eventually be developed to a collaboration platform, a forum to support users and developers alike. The aim of the project is to establish the platform permanently as a virtual competence center to make the results of developments in the area of electronic publishing available in the long term and to effectively support their use and future developments. The platform is amenable to the presentation of international developed publication tools provided that they can be reused freely....
Update (11/5/08). When I read the announcement, I couldn't tell whether CARPET was to be a list of publishing tools or a publishing tool itself. I put my question to Melanie Stetter, CARPET project public relations the Max Planck Digital Library, and she was good enough to let me quote her reply. (Thanks, Melanie.)
CARPET will not be a tool itself though it aims to be more than just a list. At first we will list existing tools starting with 17 German projects, for example institutional repositories or e-journals, which developed tools on their own and want to make those tools reusable for others more easily. The simple list will be refined to allow comparison between the tools on different levels. You will for example be able to choose if you're looking for a tool for workflow support, a converter or document management, at first, and then you can specify your requirements for the tool (or service). We're planning to have a structure similar to Iterating.com.
Later in the project we hope that the "list" will evolve into a community platform which encourages exchange of information and tools within the community of developers and users and we will try to give support on questions like which tools can be easily connected with each other through interfaces, which interfaces or further developments are needed to make the tools more generic and not so much specified to the needs of the developing institute or faculty (which is the problem with most of the developments here).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/04/2008 03:51:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
