The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is thrilled to announce a partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing project to test and expand Meru.

The Educopia Institute, in partnership with Open Weave Consulting, Inc., Cast Iron Coding, Library Publishing Coalition, California Digital Library, Stratos, and Janeway, has been awarded $249,999 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to expand digital infrastructure options for library publishing programs that are open source, community-led, and grounded in academic values.

NGLP was recently featured on the SPARC blog in a profile that highlights our efforts to “create a robust, values-driven, and community-led system to share knowledge.”

NGLP product owner, Sarah Lippincott, and co-PI Katherine Skinner have published a new article discussing the centrality of assessment and accountability mechanisms in governing an equitable and sustainable knowledge commons.

From the Budapest Open Access Initiative 20th anniversary recommendations to the UNESCO Recommendation for Open Science and the Harvard endorsement of Diamond OA, many recent reports on open scholarship are calling for scholarly research to be published and disseminated via open infrastructure that is community-owned and -governed. This call for open infrastructure is particularly important in light of the recent White House (OSTP) memo on equitable access to research, which is likely to result in a massive wave of open research publications.

The Next Generation Library Publishing project is building a sustainable open source alternative to commercial publishing platforms, expanding choices for values-driven publishers of all sizes. We are on the brink of realizing our vision as we move the pilot implementations of our software stack into production-ready service offerings.

In scholarly communications, when we talk about “vendor lock-in”, what we actually mean is the difficulty (or seeming impossibility) of moving from one platform to another: “migrations.” This can be technical. Platforms may not provide data export in a standardized format or there may be no tooling to complete the migration automatically. Lock-in can also be social, though. If the terms of the platform take coercive IP ownership of the data put into the platform, then it can also become impossible to move from one space to another.

The NGLP team is pleased to announce publication of “Bundle of Sticks” and the Value of Interdependence: Building a Tools and Services Collective, a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Established in 2006 as a division of The University of North Carolina Press, Longleaf Services has built a strong reputation as a mission-aligned collaborator for the university press community, offering a suite of services for small publishers that take advantage of the Press’ expertise and economies of scale. As an NGLP pilot partner, Longleaf Services will explore how to bring scalable and efficient publishing services to library publishers–including libraries looking to build new programs from scratch.

Library-based publishers at the Claremont Colleges, Clemson University, the University of Arizona, the University of New Orleans, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will test the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project’s open source infrastructure as part of a pilot launching this month. The pilot, led by Janeway Systems, will provide a turnkey solution that combines journal and IR publishing with end-to-end services, empowering library publishers to grow their programs through open source software tailored to their needs.