The intention of the awards is to bring stories to you about the amazing diversity of open projects that exist today in publishing. If you tweet, blog, or you are a reporter or researcher we hope that you will join us and use your tools to explore and amplify each of these amazing stories about open publishing to the world.
Book Dash is a not-for-profit, social-impact publisher of South African picture books for young children. Their vision is for every child in South Africa to own one hundred books by the age of five. The judges were simply blown away with the publishing model and how this project leverages open to achieve such an enormous impact with very few resources.
The Free Tamil Ebooks (FTE) website has existed for 5 years and releases openly licensed Ebooks in the Tamil Language (spoken in Tamilnadu, India). The judges were impressed by the very pragmatic approach Free Tamil Ebooks took to address a very real need. The project also provides educational material on open licenses, explains how to approach bloggers to re-license content as Creative Commons, and provides information on how to use free software tools (particuarly PressBooks) to make Ebooks. Free Tamil EBooks is a comprehensive ‘ecosystem’ approach to enabling the production of free content available in Tamil.
Robin Janson, a Clinical Assistant Professor at Indiana University Department of Occupational Therapy set herself the task of making openly licensed bone models so that teachers and students around the world can make quality, low-cost, instructional models to enhance learning. This is the story of objects as open content, and how one woman educator is working passionately to make freely licensed bone models available to help her students. The story is also a great example of how open practitioners can build on the value and works created by other open practitioners.
Wikidata stands out for its scale and its quiet development of a set of massive data resources. Specifically when we think about publishing it is allowing us to connect the millions of research outputs and concepts, organisations and individuals and to understand how they relate to each other. Openness and open content are central to Wikidata. It is fundamentally built on open data and demonstrates the necessity of clear permissions for building integrated systems at scale. The judges were impressed by the scale and the central commitment to openness the Wikidata and the broader Wikimedia community exemplifies and its power to enable a wide range of communities through open structured data. The impact of Wikidata is developing but it already underpins a range of tools and systems such as Scholia, but has also enabled the scaling of other massive datasets. The potential is significant.
Recogito is a great example of an open source software project that considers ‘open’ as more than just a license. Recogito has a very open model for the ongoing development of the tool, actively involving its constituency in conversations about what they want to see in the tool. The judges felt that the tool itself is obviously impressive and has impact, but including the people that need to use the tool in the development process has undoubtedly lead to the tools successful uptake and adoption by researchers. It is an enlightened open source development process addressing a real use case.
Citation Style Language (CSL) is simply a very important project for publishing. It has widespread adoption in important platforms and plays a critical role in the scholarly publishing landscape. It is also important in that it is an open source project populated by a diverse set of skill sets and research perspectives. The judges felt that in recent discussions about publishing infrastructure important projects like CSL are often under discussed because they are so foundational to be rendered almost invisible. We would like to celebrate and highlight the achievements of this very important project.
matplotlib is versatile and powerful Python data visualization library. It has been recently used for rendering the first picture of a black hole and to illustrate the existence of gravitational waves. As with so many open source software projects, the judges were impressed not by the newness of the project, but how critical matplotlib is to the current and future open publishing landscape. If we did not have matplotlib we would simply have to invent it .
AFRO-PWW presents a complete ecosystem approach to Open Access publishing. The project doesn’t just publish Open Access woks, it helps projects choose appropriate open source software for authoring/processing/publishing materials, plays an important role in training researchers to use these tools, and then educates their constituency as to Open Access licensing and publishing options. Further, AFRO-PWW is fully invested in exploring new digital models for scholarship and helps “scholars navigate the new opportunities presented by collaborative, multi-modal, and interim phase works. “ The judges felt that not only is AFRO-PWW interesting in itself but it is a strong model for filling important open knowledge gaps from marginalized communities. We hope the model is inspiring and useful to you and may influence open knowledge projects to come.
The Open Library of Humanities is a born open-access publisher which specialises in internationally-leading, rigorous and peer-reviewed scholarship across the humanities disciplines in 27 journals. The platform is 100% open-access, but unlike every other major humanities OA journal publication platform, it has no fees for authors. OLH is instead supported by approximately 250 academic libraries worldwide. The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a force of nature. Uncompromisingly open and collaborative. The judges were impressed about every aspect of OLH but without doubt their carefully considered Open Access economic model is comprehensive and inspiring.
WikiJournals publishes a set of open-access, peer-reviewed academic journals with no publishing costs to authors. Its goal is to provide free, quality-assured knowledge. Secondly, it aims to bridge the Academia-Wikipedia gap by enabling expert contributions in the traditional academic publishing format to improve Wikipedia content. However it is the model that the judges found most interesting. WikiJournals play in the space between mass collaborative knowledge cultures like Wikipedia and more contained, linear models that we see in peer reviewed journals.
Since 1998, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has been developing open source software for scholarly publishing including Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP). The project gives academic communities, including researchers, librarians, students, and staff, opportunities to develop scholarly capacities with a global reach. PKP has made a clear and important impact on the world of open publishing over the last 20+ years and has cut a path for many that have followed. The open publishing sector, and particularly those in scholarly communications, owe a debt of gratitude to this essential and pioneering project.
The goal of the inaugural Open Publishing Awards is to promote and celebrate a wide variety of open projects in Publishing.
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