Putting Meru to the test with campus-based publishers

Big Ten Academic Alliance (2024)

Platform providers: Janeway, Cast Iron Coding
Technologies: Meru, Janeway, Esploro, Pressbooks
Stakeholders: BTAA, Penn State Libraries, Indiana University Libraries

This pilot project will build and populate a consortial instance of Meru, creating a single aggregate discovery layer for the many disparate publishing platforms of the participating libraries, enabling an experience of them as a single, shared collection of published open access materials.

This project complements and builds upon our IMLS-funded project with the University of Iowa Libraries.

Partnership for Open Publishing (2024)

Service providers: UNC Press
Platform providers: Janeway, Cast Iron Coding
Technologies: Meru, Janeway
Stakeholders: University of North Carolina System Libraries

The Partnership for Open Publishing (POP) is a publishing model, set of tools, and service offering developed by the University of North Carolina Press to advance open access (OA) scholarship across the statewide UNC System. POP grows out of the Press’s wide-ranging strategy to further OA publishing. Our initial goal is to support OA journal publishing in partnership with each institution’s library. Content published on POP will be discoverable, accessible, and presented under each school’s instance. POP grew out of an earlier phase of the Next Generation Library Publishing initiative, which was supported by grants from the Arcadia Fund. POP is funded in part by UNCP, which is coordinating with NGLP on developing Meru, and the Provost’s office of UNC Chapel Hill, which has committed to two years of support.

University of Iowa Libraries (2024)

Platform providers: Janeway, Cast Iron Coding
Technologies: Meru, Janeway, Esploro
Stakeholders: University of Iowa Libraries publishing initiative

This pilot project will build and populate an instance of Meru,

• extracting their entire corpus of published content (within the limitations of content schemas available), transforming the content to align with the Meru content schema, and loading the content into the test instance of Meru;

• formally evaluating the pilot; and

• contributing to the development of roadmap materials that help other library publishers adopt NGLP infrastructure.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services LG-254921-OLS-23.

Consortial Publishing (2022)

Service providers: CDL
Platform providers: CDL, Cast Iron Coding
Technologies: Janeway, DSpace, Meru
Stakeholders: University of California campus libraries, faculty and students

Including the same modular technologies as the combined journal and IR hosted solution pilot, this pilot will focus on serving the needs of large-scale, consortial publishing environments. CDL currently publishes 85+ OA journals and has over 315,000 OA items in its IR, but its platforms are in need of a substantial refresh. CDL staff will load substantial amounts of this journal and IR content and data into the system to verify its fitness for a complex, multi-institutional publishing program. This pilot will demonstrate how a library publisher running local technology can leverage components of the NGLP modular architecture to upgrade and expand established consortial library services. 

Turnkey Journal and IR Publishing (2022)

Service providers: Janeway 
Platform providers: Janeway, Cast Iron Coding, DSpace
Technologies: Meru, Janeway
Stakeholders: Early adopting library publishers interested in a single solution for journal and IR content

Combining journal publishing and institutional repository functions with an elegant display layer and powerful reporting tools, this pilot will demonstrate the viability of packaging NGLP’s open source publishing stack into a hosted, turnkey, values-aligned software as a service (SaaS) model. The pilot will use Janeway as a journal manuscript submission system and will harvest metadata and files from Janeway for display in the Web Delivery Platform (WDP). Existing journal and IR content (i.e., PDFs and metadata for a test corpus of previously published articles supplied by each partner) will be gathered and manually pre-populated in the WDP. In a future iteration of the stack, DSpace will function as the IR submission and management system; however, it is unlikely that this pathway will be available for this pilot. The Analytics Dashboard (AD) will aggregate usage metrics from the WDP and workflow metrics from Janeway to provide rich reporting for repository administrators. 

Journals Portal (2022)

Service providers: Longleaf Services, Inc (a subsidiary of UNC Press)
Platform providers: Janeway, Cast Iron Coding
Technologies: Meru, Janeway
Stakeholders: individual journal publishers/editors within the University of North Carolina system

This pilot demonstrates the ability to build coalitions and scale across library publishers in much the same way that CDL has done but working through a non-profit, mission-aligned publishing services partner, Longleaf. The pilot will focus on journals initially with the aspiration to expand to books. Longleaf has identified an initial set of interested library-based publishing initiatives across the seventeen-campus University of North Carolina system who are either seeking a more robust solution for self-hosted publications or who are interested in outsourcing the platform and some editorial services associated with campus-based journals to a third party. The pilot will also explore the opportunity to aggregate the display of these individual publications under a consortial, institution-based identity. This pilot will demonstrate how the NGLP modular components can be deployed to establish a journal services business for existing and new journals within an institutional setting. And the pilot will serve as a demonstration case for university administration that library publishing can scale and that there are trusted open source platforms and reliable service providers in this space.