We’re here to talk about a system called “mPach” being developed at U-M for publishing born-digital open-access journals (“m” for Michigan and “pach” is a play on words for “package” and “pachyderm”). It’s being jointly developed by DLPS, which handles digitization and building of infrastructures for digital content, and by MPublishing, the primary academic publishing enterprise of the University of Michigan Library, which publishes and distributes material in various media under imprints including the University of Michigan Press, Open Humanities Press, and the Michigan Historical Reprints Series.In order to explain why and how we’re going about this, let me give some context for how we’ve been handled online journals at U-M.
Since the mid-’90s, the U-M Library has digitized select publications, including journals, and made them available online.
Now, if you’ve been around the world of digital libraries for a while, you probably recognize the digital library software behind this.
Explain what DLXS is and why U-M was outgrowing it: no trusted repository behind it (just a file system!), search and delivery were tightly coupled, no relationships among digital objects. Furthermore, when the Google partnership got going and we were going to be receiving digitized content from Google, we knew that we couldn’t just keep using DLXS.
Lessons learned from DLXS were incorporated into the infrastructure behind MBooks, which was the next-generation system for things digitized from paper. The infrastructure for MBooks was rebranded as and formed the basis for the HathiTrust, which grew to include content from other institutions besides U-M. Collections like American Jewess are being incorporated into HathiTrust, which also includes journal volumes scanned by Google.
MPublishing has also been putting journals online.
Since MPublishing’s journals are still being published, instead of scanned page images we instead have digital text created from born-digital sources like Word or InDesign documents. (Explain convesion workflow.)Believe it or not, this is also DLXS. We’ve spent a lot of time rewriting large portions of the code to handle our publications, but some part of the architecture are so deeply ingrained that we just have to work around them.
And so …
mPach is a package of tools being developed to provide a modular platform to enable the publication of born-digital open-access journals in the HathiTrust repository. Specifically, it contains a set of modifications to the existing HathiTrust code base, plus entirely new components, that facilitate ingest, display, and discoverability of journal literature in the HathiTrust repository. All of these components will be tightly coupled with the HathiTrust repository. mPach willprovide all of the tools needed to publish an open-access journal online, and it is designed to allow integration with popular journal publishing tools such as Open Journal Systems (OJS).
mPach: Publishing Directly in HathiTrust
mPach: Publishing directly in HathiTrustKevin Hawkins (@KevinSHawkins) and Jeremy Morse (@JeremyGMorse) MPublishing (@M_Publishing) University of Michigan Library 1
Opportunities• HathiTrust – offers a better infrastructure for development than DLXS – is certified by Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC)• There’s growing interest among institutions in building a shared infrastructure for publishing. 11
mPach: what are we creating?• modular platform• tightly coupled with the HathiTrust repository• for open-access journals• all you need to publish and preserve an OA journal• will integrate with Open Journal Systems (OJS) 12
Not just for us!Just as the DLXS and HathiTrust infrastructureswere originally designed to meet needs atMichigan but later made available to otherinstitutions, we plan to do the same with themPach tool set. 14
TimelineNow: Normalization of articles to JATSSoon: Ingest of articles into HathiTrustrepositoryLonger term: 1. MPublishing staff use it. 2. MPublishing journal editors use it directly. 3. You use it too! 15