Library releasing new publishing tool

By Barry Shell
Associate librarian Brian Owen is excited about a new open-source publishing
tool the SFU Library will launch July 8–10 during the 2nd International PKP
Scholarly Publishing Conference at SFU’s Vancouver campus at Harbour Centre.

It’s called Open Monograph Press (OMP). "It’s going to do for scholarly
monographs what OJS has done for scholarly journals," says Owen, referring
to Open Journal Systems, the largely SFU-developed publishing-management
software adopted by some 2,000 journals worldwide since it was introduced in
2001.

PKP—the Public Knowledge Project—is a non-profit research initiative of SFU,
UBC and Stanford University dedicated to making the results of publicly
funded research freely available through open-access policies and to
developing strategies for making that possible.

OMP is based on a modularization of the OJS program, allowing separate
modules to be recombined on a common platform to produce customized systems
for journals, conferences and monographs. The modularization lets the press
drag and drop pieces into place that best match their editorial process.

SFU Library uses OJS to host more than 150 online scholarly journals based
in dozens of countries. SFU contract programmer Alec Smecher recently
returned from Asia where he worked on Asian Journals Online, a project that
uses OJS to build national journal-publishing portals in Vietnam, Nepal, Sri
Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

"It’s possible for anyone to inexpensively host a web site that’s as
attractive and professional-looking as *Nature* or the *British Medical
Journal*, but online publishing in the developing world still has a long way
to go," says Smecher.

"Pushing open access, both in the West and in the developing world, further
decreases the gap between them by providing each access to the other’s
research free of charge," says Smecher.

Owen says OJS and the new Open Monograph Press offer a complete publishing
package, from review process workflow management all the way through to
publication. Both free and subscription models are supported.

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Fuente: http://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/news/story_06250905.shtml