IRIS Photos

DPUBS Launch


David Ruddy

The Library’s effort to promote change in scholarly communications reached an important milestone in October with the open-source release of DPubS. DPubS, the software platform that supports Project Euclid, is now available for free to other institutions, providing them with the tools to take an active role in the publication of scholarly literature. Such activity on the part of academic libraries and their partners will increase the publishing options available to scholars and help create reasonably priced alternatives in scholarly communications. DPubS will help libraries build publishing programs and manage the dissemination of an expanding number of scholarly publications.

DPubS has been significantly enhanced over the last two years, supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The software has been generalized so that content formats other than journal literature can be published with it. The system comes ready to publish journals, conference proceedings, and monographs and can be configured to accept and deliver content in virtually any format. The DPubS interface is entirely XML/XSLT driven, allowing easy customization of a publication’s Web presence. The system is OAI-PMH 2.0 compatible, and, if desired, DPubS can use Fedora as an underlying repository. Similar support for DSpace is being investigated. In addition, DPubS includes administrative management tools for nontechnical staff and can support both open-access and subscription-based publications.

The two-year DPubS development project was carried out in partnership with Penn State University (PSU) Libraries and Press. PSU contributed invaluable testing and installation advice and was responsible for much of the programming work for Fedora interoperability. The bulk of the project development work, however, was done by CUL, and three DLIT programmer/analysts, David Fielding, Shin-Woo Kim, and Josh Santelli did the heavy lifting. In addition, Michael Wakoff helped develop the conference proceedings and monographs metadata schemes, and Victor Lonsberry guided the project’s publicity and outreach efforts.

Although DPubS has come a long way in the last two years, there are plans to take it even further. Adding tools to support the peer-review process is at the top of the development list. Also important will be additional nontechnical task interfaces and the possible connection with DSpace. We will also give attention to encouraging adopters and nurturing an open-source development community. The DPubS architecture is well suited to distributed and collaborative development. As we gain committed adopters, enhancements and extensions will come from the open-source community. This is the promise of open-source development.

Some examples of DPubS-supported publications include Cornell’s Project Euclid; Medieval Philosophy and Theology, formerly published by Cambridge University Press; Indonesia, published by Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program; and Pennsylvania History, published by Penn State University.