Driving a vision of publisher efficiency through collaboration

Abstract

The publishing world is weighed down by print-centric legacy workflows, siloed technology, manual processes, and vendor lock-in. It is easy for publishers to feel that meeting demands to be experimental in terms of business models, editorial processes and content types while also becoming more efficient and reducing costs is nearby impossible. Funders, institutions and researchers are asking for more transparency and openness in the publishing process and, while publishers may agree in principle, getting there poses significant operational and technological challenges. Other industries have reinvented themselves by collaborating on shared infrastructure, acknowledging that the foundational layers of their operations are not where the competitive advantages lie. By embracing a collaborative mindset, scholarly publishers can achieve more while simultaneously reducing cost and time-to-publication. Community-built open source is one such method of building new, shared infrastructure. The Collaborative Knowledge (Coko) Foundation is leading projects to create new platform technologies and workflows that can significantly streamline publishing, giving publishers opportunities to address challenges and industry demands. Importantly, we consider what it takes for publishers to truly collaborate; and how an adjustment of mindset and structure is needed to maximize the effectiveness of a new kind of open source for scholarly communications.