Category: blog post

Interesting Days

So.. recently, as in – yesterday – there was some news that Elsevier are acquiring Aries. Aries makes the closed source Manuscript Submission System – Editorial Manager.

Elsevier is like the Death Star in the Journal world… I mean, so many in the academic and scholarly publishing worlds despise Elsevier that it is actually a little shocking to hear them talk about it.

Aries is also not very well liked either since they have produced a pretty terrible software for managing journals. It is expensive and painful to use. Despite ridiculous assertions that it is a ‘best of class’ system:

Not many publishers would agree with that! It is a thoroughly unimaginative and misguided assertion ripped straight out of the Aries Press Release – https://www.ariessys.com/views-press/news-opinion/elsevier-acquire-aries-systems-best-class-publication-workflow-solutions-provider/

So, the coupling of the two seems to be quite an event, especially since many Journals, the ones that don’t like Elsevier, have their content hosted in Editorial Manager. Seems like the worst of the worst situation for those folks.

Which is exactly what our good friend Alison Mudditt must have been feeling (we worked with Alison when she was at UCP) when she posted the following:

At Coko, we have been telling people since day one that publishing infrastructure should be open source because one day you will wake up and you just don’t know who will now own the keys to your workflow and content kingdoms…

These things are not hard to predict… if you want to make some money as a seer, just pick a popular closed source platform and say out loud ‘I predict one day they will make decisions that are not in your best interests’… recently I said this about Medium and Github, as well as Editorial Manager…

…and what do you know… yes, astonishing, I must have the best crystal ball ever!…. sigh…. predicting the future has never been so easy. Sadly this kind of makes predicting the future a tragic business to be in. It’s like a reverse boy-who-cried-wolf situation – what happens when you cry wolf but everyone stays in bed, and the wolf shows up and eats a villager – every time? What do you do with that?

It is apparent Aries did not have their clients’ best interests at heart – they know the feeling the sector has about Elsevier… and for many, many publishers this will be seen as a breach of trust. Bad luck for their clients that are now feeling very uncomfortable and wondering what Aries has landed them in.

So, if I might make another prediction – I think this recent acquisition is going to be awesome. Awesome because it may finally be a wake-up moment for publishers, a reminder that they should own their own infrastructure and not be beholden to organisations that do not have their best interests at heart.

For those feeling disorientated right now and wondering what to do… come talk to us, and join the growing movement to replace the current proprietary publishing tools with an open source publishing infrastructure. We are happy to help!

Roadmapping Athens to SF

Just been in Athens, hanging out with the Coko Athens crew – Yannis, Christos, Giannis and Alexis. A thoroughly good bunch.

I think before I’ve mentioned how proud I am to work with them and what we are achieving. I mean, it’s a teamof 4 people and together they are developing 3 publishing platforms and a sophisticated web-based word processor … essentially 4 platforms – Editoria, xpub (Journals), micropubs, and Wax (editor)… I mean… talk about punching above your weight! More than that, we have fun doing it.

Every month I come to Athens and we discuss the coming month’s roadmaps. I come for a few days, we drink a lot of Freddo Espresso and sometimes (at the other end of the day) some margaritas. In between, we order some iffy delivery food and plan the future.

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The roadmapping sessions involve us going through each platform together, and looking at last month’s roadmap. Discuss the next priorities and approaches, and then commit those to the next month’s roadmap for that project. It’s pretty interesting and super great to have everyone involved in the process. We get a good wide range of opinions and at the same time give everyone ownership of their own project. This is what collaboration is all about.

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So some short notes here on this month’s roadmapping…

Wax – We have come very close to a fully functional web-based word processor based on the Substance libs. It is looking amazing with support for the normal editor stuff – headings, images, bold etc – plus some amazingly sophisticated features including track changes, notes management (more complex than it sounds), thread-based commenting/annotations, diacritics support … and a lot more… However, we have decided to start building a new Wax based on the ProseMirror libs, mainly because there is a lack of community around the substance.io libraries and we wish to de-risk ourselves going forward. So we’ll finish off Wax 1.0 with a Substance upgrade which will also bring us table support, nested lists, and some other issues. At the same time we will continue developing the new Wax (we already have something basic working) – first by adding some interesting widgets that the ProseMirror community have built, and then by building a simple plugin structure for editor widgets. We split Wax roadmaps up, but the important stuff for the current wax is listed in the Editoria repo – https://gitlab.coko.foundation/editoria/editoria#roadmap

xpub – we are now fixing a few bugs in the journal system and moving forward with migrating to the new shared data model that was collaboratively designed at the recent PubSweet meeting in Cambridge (UK). This will include some initial research into GraphQL (part and parcel of the migration). Part-way through August, Giannis is attending the Libero workshop at eLife and will work on that with the eLife team for 2 weeks. Libero is the open source web-delivery part of the publishing cycle that eLife has designed and is about to build. So we want to put into that effort and learn what we can. That also means the actual migration to the new data model will happen after those 2 weeks ie. We’ll start it on Sept 1. More info here – https://gitlab.coko.foundation/xpub/xpub#roadmap

Editoria – this is coming along fast. Alexis just added EPUB export and overhauled the workflow management tool. Editoria is pretty much ‘fully fledged’ although we have many ideas for new features – however much of this will wait until the Editoria community meeting in San Francisco in October. In the meantime, we are being good open source citizens and writing a lot of under-the-hood tests. Alexis will also spend a day or so writing a new Authsome mode to match the Book Sprints workflow to show that the auth app Jure (PubSweet lead dev) built is indeed plug-and-play. More info here – https://gitlab.coko.foundation/editoria/editoria#roadmap

Micropubs – we are developing a micropublications platform with the Wormbase crew. Its early days but ison schedule with the first thin slice. It contains complex integrations and complex submission forms. But Yannis is making good speed, so more of the same! https://gitlab.coko.foundation/micropubs/wormbase#roadmap

It is, as I said above, an awesome team. I’m very proud of what we are achieving together and I like to punch above our weight. Much more information coming soon about all of this as we go!

Spending a night tomorrow in the UK, and then to San Francisco for a meet with Kristen, attending FOO camp and many other bits n pieces.

The Awesome Paged.js

So, I’ve been pursuing this dream for many years… every since I started rendering books in the browser using an ad-hoc collection of tools around 10 years ago…. then I instigated the book.js project (which unfortunately died due to lack of browser support of CSS Regions), and now… paged.js…

Built by the talented trio of Julie Blanc, Fred Chasen and Julien Taquet – it’s all open source and modular… there is a lot to this story, but we’ll get to that. Full release in a few weeks, this is a sneak peak:

Paged.js – sneak peeks

This project is entirely funded by the awesome Shuttleworth Foundation.

Out of Moz

Just about to leave Mozambique. I was here for holiday, longer than I expected as I couldn’t get a visa to South Africa. I had fun in Tofo buuuuuutttt no waves and it was pretty ‘cold’ (relatively speaking). It was ok, read a lot.

Tofo pics…the Inhumbane airport was pretty slick. The flights are also a little like bus tours…stopping off a few times on the way to let people off and pick up some new passengers.

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Then I returned to the capital – Maputo a little early cause I got sick and the non-surf was tormenting me. So… crazy as it sounds, when I travel I love checking out local supermarkets. They always tell you something about what’s going on.  I took the following photos of a local supermarket that is all Chinese, next to my hotel… reflecting the heavy Chinese investment happening in East South/East Africa.

It feels like the kind of advance supermarket you would establish if you were taking over a country and you wanted to make sure you had everything ready for when you shipped in the invading capitalists…everything you need from aisles and aisles of noodles and soy sauce, to industrial cookers, spare no parking signs, football trophies, life jackets, a million different kinds of power adapters, industrial cookers, and, of course, tea to improve your sex life and cure hemorrhoids. No joke.

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Anyho…back to reality.