Nancy Eaton
Dean of Libraries
Pennsylvania State University
H. Thomas Hickerson
Associate University Librarian
Cornell University
Cornell University Library and Pennsylvania State University Libraries and Press have embarked on a project to generalize and enhance DPubS (Digital Publishing System) and to make it available for broad use under an open source license. DPubS 1.0 was developed at Cornell to provide a robust publishing platform for support of Project Euclid, a partnership with publishers worldwide to support affordable distribution of serial literature in mathematics and statistics. This SPARC-endorsed initiative has generated interest and support worldwide. As a result, several institutions have expressed interest in acquiring the underlying software, but further development is necessary to meet the diverse range of needs currently evolving among libraries, publishers, and scholars. Additionally, distribution as an easily applicable open source system requires further work, and there is strong interest in enabling easy interoperability with open source institutional repositories, offering a versatile publishing capability for IR initiatives.
With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this effort is now underway, and a beta version of DPubS 2.0 is scheduled for testing in late 2005.
In order to insure broad applicability in addressing academic publishing requirements, representatives from a diverse range of libraries and publishers were invited to a meeting held at Cornell in late October. The goals of the meeting were to conduct a thorough review of proposed enhancements and to encourage ongoing participation in the development process. Attendees included participants from a dozen U.S. universities, and also representatives from institutions in Australia, China, Germany, and Japan. While this briefing will provide an overview of this software development initiative, particular attention will be devoted to reporting on the October meeting and resulting conclusions.
DPubS System and Development Agenda
(Word document)