In July 2004, the Cornell University Library, in partnership with the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and Press, initiated a project to develop an open-source electronic publishing platform designed to enable new models for scholarly communication and academic publishing. DPubS v.2 was first released under the open source Educational Community License in October, 2006. Cornell and the Pennsylvania State University Libraries are continuing development of the DPubS system during 2008.
DPubS (Digital Publishing System) is an open-source software system designed to enable the organization, presentation, and delivery of scholarly journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and other common and evolving means of academic discourse. DPubS was conceived by Cornell University Library to aid colleges and universities in managing and disseminating the intellectual discoveries and writing of scholars and researchers.
Since no two electronic publishers’ needs are alike, DPubS was developed to be uniquely customizable. Its modular architecture provides flexibility—the system can be extensively customized to meet local needs. Because it has abundant Web-presentation capabilities, the presentation of each publication can be individually tailored, allowing for creative branding opportunities. Publishers can configure DPubS to deliver full-text content as well as to accept metadata in any file format. Publishers can also set the access controls to support subscription, open-access, or pay-per-view options and can configure DPubS to interoperate with institutional repositories such as Fedora. Finally, DPubS was designed to be extensible and scalable to support various publishing environments.
Characteristics That Set DPubS Apart From Other Systems
- Enables publication, resource discovery, and delivery of journal, monographic, and grey literature with the same technology environment
- Scales well to support an expanding number and variety of publications
- A library-developed tool, designed with an understanding of sustainability and preservation issues, to support change in the scholarly communication environment
- Supports the building of a library-supported publishing program and facilitates cooperation with university presses
- Modular architecture makes DPubS flexible and extensible
- Accommodates both open access and e-commerce to support different business models