More on DPubS

Brenda Chawner has blogged some notes on two presentations on DPubS, apparently at the LITA Forum 2006 (Nashville, October 26-29, 2006).  Excerpt:

This concurrent session covered the background, purpose, and evolution of the DPubS (Digital Publishing Systems) open source software project, based at Cornell University Library, as well as a case study based on Pennsylvania State University Libraries' use of the package....

David Ruddy, from Cornell University Library's Electronic Publishing Initiatives division, who has been involved with the project for a number of years, started by saying that the project had two main objectives:

• to allow publishers to organise and deliver both open access and subscription controlled content; and
• to give users the ability to navigate and access content....

The DPubS software began as a project in the Computer Science department, and was picked up the the Library in the late 1990s....The integration with an institutional repository means that the repository software can look after preservation and archiving, while DPubs focusses on presentation and access controls.

DPubS 2.0 was released in October 2006 on Sourceforge; it supports OAI 2.0, and can be used in combination with Fedora as an underlying repository.

Further plans include extending the editorial tools to support peer review, enabling it to work with dSpace as well as Fedora, enhancing the administration interfaces, documentation, and allowing contributions from the user community using the open source development model....

Mike Furlough, from Pennsylvania State University Libraries, then gave a user's perspective on DPubS. Penn State has been a DPubS development partner, and their involvement has included testing alpha versions of the software, testing its integration with Fedora and dSpace, developing test cases for journal backfiles and conference proceedings, and refining and testing the editorial services.

At Penn State, the University Press is part of the University Libraries. The Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing wants to provide a scholar driven service, particularly for at risk literature. They hope to experiment with different business models; currently all of their content is available as open access, except for a print on demand facility....