Analysis and news
Investing in a brighter future The new non-profit Knowledge Futures Group offers institutions a valuable scholarly communications resource, writes Heather Staines
Recently, interest in utilising open source software tools to create and disseminate scholarly content has grown. Continuing consolidation in the publishing technology space has fuelled this trend with increasing concern about potential ‘lock in’ for libraries and publishers and ‘lock out’ for societies and independent content creators. (See Roger Schonfeld, Open Source for Scholarly Publishing: An Inventory and an Analysis, The Scholarly Kitchen, August 8, 2018. A shift to open source technology, with code published openly and a permissive reuse license, enables publishers to ensure ongoing availability and control of content. However, an impression that such technology requires significant human and technical resources remains. Fortunately, ongoing education is correcting this impression. (See Adam Hyde, Open Source and Scholarly Publishing, The Scholarly Kitchen, September 6, 2018. I joined the then MIT-affiliated
Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) in 2019, excited to further explore open source technology for publishers, libraries, researchers and beyond. (In spring of 2020, the Knowledge Futures Group became an independent 501.3(c), although it continues to partner closely with the MIT Press and MIT communities.) MIT Press Director Amy Brand has written extensively about the need for academic institutions to invest in scholarly communications infrastructure. To help institutions direct their attention and funds towards both challenges and solutions that most affect their communities, the KFG recently launched four thematic programs: Knowledge Ecosystems, Community Publishing, Measuring Knowledge, and Universal Data. Our tools include the open platform PubPub and the forthcoming open knowledge graph, the Underlay.
A June 2019 report, funded by the Mellon Foundation, supported by MIT Press, and written by John Maxwell, Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms, noted the clear lack of incentives for
22 Research Information August/September 2020
Knowledge Futures Group is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“AfricArXiv is a free, open source, community led preprint server, founded in 2018 to raise the visibility of African research”
collaboration, due in part to tool creators chasing the same philanthropic funding. In response to this, KFG is seeking, and finding, ample opportunities for collaboration with other open source initiatives, as well as with commercial entities wishing to explore a more open offering in community publishing.
AfricArXiv AfricArXiv is a free, open source, community led preprint server, founded in 2018 to raise the visibility of African research, increase continent-wide collaboration, and inspire interdisciplinary and local language research, hosted on the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework, Zenodo, Science Open and now PubPub. Inspired by a common mission, in spring 2020, AfricArXiv and KFG announced a collaboration on PubPub around audio and video preprints and capacity building and training around scholarly communication. The AfricArXiv community page on PubPub also serves as an archive for
thought leadership webinars and other multimedia content by AfricArXiv and partner organisations such as SciComm Nigeria and TCC Africa. ‘Launching audio/visual preprints takes
scholarly communication to the next level – giving scientists the multimedia platform to express their expertise not only in text but truly engaging with other researchers,’ suggests Joy Owango, director of TCC Africa. Obasegun Ayodele, CTO Vilsquare, encouraged researchers, away from their labs due to the Covid-19 lockdown, to use laptops and smartphones to digitise their work and push it out to preprint servers. ‘This partnership will empower African researchers to explore immediate communication of their research despite the COVID-19 lockdown. The results from this initiative will help us further understand the best COVID-19 response and intervention strategy for researchers across Africa.’ (In related preprint news, PubPub will soon act as host for CrimRxiv.)
Punctum Books blog Punctum Books is an independent, not- for-profit, benefit corporation publishing open access books ‘dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry’ with ‘a fondness for neo-traditional and unconventional scholarly work’. In 2019, Punctum began blogging on PubPub. Having previously used WordPress and Twitter for communication, Punctum recognised a need for readers encountering Punctum messaging to be able to trace narratives back in a slower
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