California Digital Library joins Public Knowledge Project
Date: 2012-02-07
Contact: Catherine Mitchell, Director of Publishing, CDL
Phone: (510) 587-6132
Email: catherine.mitchell@ucop.edu

OAKLAND — As the scholarly publishing landscape heats up with more talk of boycotts and Open Access mandates, administrators at research libraries increasingly find themselves at a crossroads between publishers and faculty and are actively working to provide new solutions to entrenched problems. The California Digital Library's (CDL) latest foray into this issue, on behalf of the University of California system, focuses on supporting an open source publishing infrastructure through a partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP).

As a result of this partnership, the CDL will assist with PKP's ongoing development and support of its open source software suite: Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS) and Open Harvester System (OHS), with Open Monograph Press (OMP) due for release in the coming year.

"The California Digital Library is widely recognized for its record of innovation and leadership in the domain of scholarly publishing," said Chuck Eckman, dean of library services at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. "The SFU Library is thrilled at the prospects this new collaborative venture creates for advancing our shared scholarly communication goals."

Laine Farley, CDL executive director, noted, "Not only are we extremely pleased with the flexibility afforded by OJS, we are also delighted to join this growing international community and contribute to the future growth of this publishing solution."

The California Digital Library, in partnership with UC campus libraries, supports and encourages open access publishing initiatives within the UC system through its eScholarship publishing and institutional repository platform. eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship. Home to 45 peer-reviewed journals (http://escholarship.org/uc/search?smode=browse;browse-journal=aa), eScholarship recently has transitioned to OJS as its journal management and submission system and has integrated OJS with its pre/post-print, books and working papers repository, which contains more than 45,000 UC-affiliated publications. 

John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, Library Scholar in Residence and professor (limited term) in publishing studies at Simon Fraser University and founding director of PKP, said: "Given the leadership, innovation, and engagement shown by CDL in moving scholarly communication into a digital era marked by a spirit of greater openness and sharing aimed at the advancement of learning, this partnership provides a wonderful opportunity for PKP to further explore ways that faculty and librarians can work together to make more of what we do more of a public good."

The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve. The CDL Publishing Group delivers open access digital publication services to the UC academic community, supports widespread distribution of UC research materials and fosters new models of scholarly publishing through the development and application of advanced technologies. 

The Public Knowledge Project is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research. With more than 11,500 installations of Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS) and Open Harvester Systems (OHS) around the world, PKP has proven that open source software can be a game changer in scholarly publishing.

In September 2011, PKP launched a major sustainability campaign to ensure the continued development and enhancement of its open source software suite and to provide better support for the growing PKP user community. To find out more about this initiative and how your site can become a PKP sponsor, visit the PKP website at http://pkp.sfu.ca.