Featured Library/Press Collaboration

The Development of an Open Source Publishing System

The internet timeline is short and frenetic.  The net has spawned occult acronyms, stupendous commercial failures, and now—for those of us who commerce in scholarly journals and monographs at the shallow end of the 21st century—many costly choices but few affordable options for the delivery of content.

In the less complicated 1990s university presses thought small and worked alone. The first books and journals to be distributed electronically had established marquee value in the mid-90s: The Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press) and The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (MIT) are often cited as examples of “greenfield” projects.

Technical innovations and economic pressures still cast a long shadow over the scholarly publishing community.  Readers’ and users’ appetites have become more sophisticated while the cost structures for managing and delivering book and especially journal content electronically have become far more complex.

Five years ago, the Cornell University Library submitted a proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the support of the design and deployment of a mechanism and environment for the on-line distribution of serial literature in mathematics and statistics.  Project Euclid was funded in 2000 and launched as a multi-model publishing service in early 2003.  Today Euclid delivers nearly 40 journals to libraries and individuals under subscription, hosting, or open access delivery plans.

Project Euclid's technology infrastructure is based on a modular digital library architecture and protocol developed at Cornell in the early 1990s.  The model developed by the Library from this early digital library instantiation is now known as DPubS (Digital Publishing System).  DPubS was designed specifically to organize, navigate, access, and deliver both open access and subscription controlled scholarly publications. 

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