Category: Coko Foundation

Open Innovation

Reading Open Innovation – a thesis evolved by Henry Chesbrough in 2003. I have also the follow-up book published in 2006 which is a collaboration with other researchers going through his earlier thesis.

I’m researching this as I’m interested in what current literature exists that explains Open Source and why / how it works which is not from the Open Source domain. Books that emanate from the Open Source domain tend to be religious in nature and it is also true that most attacks against Open Source take it from the religious angle… so having literature that endorses the model which is not open source evangelicalism is very useful.

Previous to this I found a lot of value in The Diffusion of Innovations (originally published in 1962) by Everett Rogers.

Open Innovation and the Diffusion of Innovations separately explain quite a bit about why Open Source works, and I think I’ll post more about this as it becomes clearer in my head.

Chesbrough’s thesis can be summed up in one quote

The Open Innovation paradigm treats R&D as an open system. Open Innovation suggests that valuable ideas can come from inside or outside the company and can go to market from inside or outside the company

Essentially it is the admission that any one company doesn’t have all the smart teams/people/ideas. So how about re-imagining innovation and release it from a so-called ‘vertical innovation’ model, where all the R&D is done inhouse and where IP (Intellectual Property) is jealously guarded, to a open model where innovation essentially comes through collaboration with orgs and individuals outside the company.

From an Open Source point of view this is a ‘duh’ moment… Open Source has long expounded this approach. But…I have never found it well explained…

So it is good to find this argument made elsewhere and in clearer terms…but unfortunately the Chesborough thesis was published in 2003 when Open Source was still very young. Consequently Chesbrough reads Open Source as a idealistic and altruistic movement… he doesn’t really consider open source projects to have a business model and a business model is central to his thesis. Its a pity as Open Source has moved on since then and there are a lot of very successful and interesting examples of Open Source business models. But if you sorta squint while you are reading, and blur out the dated-ness then there is a lot of stuff that could just be quoted verbatim that makes a strong argument for Open Source as seen through the lens of the Open Innovation thesis.

Thats pretty interesting as, combined with the Diffusion of Innovations, these two bodies of work explain the value (and consequently provide a rationale which does not come from the open source sector directly) of open source. Open Innovation explains why open source is a good idea if you are a company whose business requires software to function in its core offerings, and the Diffusion of Innovation theory helps us understand why open source can beat closed source software in the arena of adoption.

The point is, if you can combine the two you have a winner – a model that enables rapid adoption and innovates faster than closed alternatives/competitors. If you can marry successful commercial activity to this you have something very powerful that can potentially wipe out the existing proprietary offerings – which is what we need in the publishing sector. The aim of what we are now doing in Coko, in this post-foundational stage, is to seed the commercial activity around the very healthy core of community technologies we have built.

Anyways… here are some quotes I liked from some of the chapters….Some of the quotes come from this chapter by Joel West and Scott Gallagher http://web.simmons.edu/~weigle/INNOVATION/Patterns%20of%20Open%20Innovation.pdf

Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology. Open Innovation processes combine internal and external ideas into architectures and systems. They utilize business models to define the requirements for these architectures and systems. The business model utilizes both external and internal ideas to create value, while defining internal mechanisms to claim some portion of that value. Open Innovation assumes that internal ideas can also be taken to market through external channels, outside the current businesses of the firm, to generate additional value

…useful knowledge is scarce, hard to find, and hazardous to rely upon (a root cause of the NIH syndrome). In Open Innovation, useful knowledge is generally believed to be widely distributed, and of generally high quality

IP becomes a critical element of innovation, since IP flows in and out of the firm on a regular basis, and can facilitate the use of markets to exchange valuable knowledge. IP can sometimes even be given away through publication, or donation.

Recently, open source software has emerged as an important phenomenon that utilizes external knowledge in a network structure (Lerner and Tirole 2002; O’Mahoney 2003; Dedrick and West 2004; von Hippel 2005)

 Most software users would face significant switching costs in using some other software package, due to some combination of retraining user skills and converting data stored in proprietary file formats. As Arthur (1996) observes, software thus has tremendous positive returns to scale, generally allowing only one (or a small number) of winners to emerge.

These winners are tempted to extract rents from their customers by increasing prices and creating additional switching costs to protect those rents (Shapiro and Varian 1999). From these production economics, commercial software firms seek to build complete systems to meet a broad range of needs, in hopes of forestalling potential competitors and protecting high gross profit margins

In other cases, a system architecture will consist of various components. Some mature (or highly competitive) components may be highly commoditized, while other pieces are more rapidly changing or otherwise difficult to imitate and thus offer opportunities for capturing economic value. Two open source examples are the IBM’s WebSphere and Apple’s Safari browser…

…Customers access the WebSphere e-commerce software using standard web browsers, so IBM originally developed a proprietary httpd (web page) server. IBM later abandoned its server for the Apache httpd server, recognizing that it would be wasting resources trying to catch up to the better quality and larger market share enjoyed by Apache (West 2003). Today, IBM engineers are involved in the ongoing Apache innovation, both for the httpd server and also related projects hosted by the Apache Software Foundation (Apache.org website)

Whooohoooooooo!

Hindawi launches its Journal system today built on Coko PubSweet tech!!!

This week, Hindawi is releasing a new peer review system that will debut on Bioinorganic Chemistry and Applications. The new platform is open source, developed as part of Hindawi’s collaboration with the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko). This release is a first step towards a network of open publishing infrastructure that Hindawi, Coko, and collaborating organisations will develop and share with the research community.

https://about.hindawi.com/blog/hindawi-launches-new-open-source-peer-review-system/

This is major news for the Coko Community.

What is xPub?

So, there are a lot of product names at Coko – PubSweet, Editoria, XSweet, INK, xPub etc etc etc… so becoming tricky to track, but I wanted it seems there are quite a few people interested in xPub right now.

xPub is not really a product as such, it’s more a group of products – each of which relates to Journal workflows. The names for each product indicyae those relationships: xpub-collabra, xpub-elife, xpub-faraday (Hindawi) and xpub-epmc

Each of these is a platform, so yip, you read it right – there are actually no less than 4 journal platforms being developed in the Coko community, not including the Micropublications platforms (of which there are two – one developed with Wormbase, and the other with the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping).

So, right from the get go our ‘offer’ is not standard. We don’t offer one platform to rule them all – there are many journal platforms in production. All of these are built on top of PubSweet… PubSweet is a kind of ‘headless’ publishing platform….it’s more or less the backend brains in that it is a kind of framework that ‘thinks like a publishing system’ but has not determined a workflow for you. So, each of the xpub-* platforms are actually publishing platforms built to meet a specific workflow and built on top of PubSweet…

Here is a crappy diagram (drawn in haste) to get the basic idea across:

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In the above, you see a PubSweet platform (eg. xpub-elife). PubSweet itself is the whole app – it sort of ‘encapsulates’ everything. Really though, you get the PubSweet core and then extend it with front-end components to meet your workflow needs. A typical front-end component might be a login screen, or a dash, a submission info page, a reviewer form etc.

You can also extend PubSweet on the back end as well (eg to enable integration with external services etc). The following is a more accurate but slightly techy architectural overview (you can skip this image and the following paragraph if you want to avoid the slightly techie part of this article).

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In case you are wondering – everything is written in Javascript. Why did we choose JS? It was a deliberate choice to go with a language that was prolific. Almost every dev around these days needs to know some Javascript (it’s the most popular language by far on Github), this makes finding a developer to work on your project is as easy as we could possibly make it. JS is also a phenomenal language these days. Fast, sophisticated and more than capable of supporting large-scale publishing requirements. I mean, if it’s good enough for Paypal, Netflix, Linkedin, Uber and ebay, then it is good enough for you.

So each PubSweet platform has its own collection of front and back end components to meet the workflow of someone’s dreams… the idea is that to achieve the platform of your dreams you can reuse what others have already built and then just build what isn’t already available. In a sense, you can ‘assemble’ your platform from existing parts.

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The nice thing about this is that each of the organisations building Journal platforms are sharing the following:

  1. the same back end/framework (PubSweet)
  2. various front (and back) end components
  3. lessons learned…

Each organisation has a vision of their ideal Journal workflow. They then design and build this on top of PubSweet, but as they do, they build various components (either page-based components such as a dashboard, or smaller UI components we call atoms and molecules) and they share these components with everyone. Hence, you should check the list of components before you start building in case the component you need already exists.

We have various agreed-upon ways to build and share components (see this as an example). These best practices are continuously evolving but you can read some of the latest discussions about this approach here – https://gitlab.coko.foundation/pubsweet/pubsweet/issues/408

Of course, all code is reusable in the Coko community because it’s all open source. The best practices are there to make the code easy to reuse.

All agreements as per above are made by consensus by the community. It is actually a pretty snappy process – don’t believe every crappy thing you read about how open source is built. Open source community processes can be elegant and fast, and the resulting code can beautiful. Coko is a good example of this – a community of professionals collaborating together to make fantastic open source software.

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So… back to the xPub story. To make these decisions on how to share components etc, we have regular meetings with various workgroups (we keep the numbers in each group small so we can move fast), and we also have quite a few in-person meetings. Not only do we have PubSweet community meetings where all of these organisations meet, but we have various get-togethers on various topics if required. For example, we met in Cambridge recently to discuss Libero (the eLife delivery product), before that EBI there was an onboarding session in Athens, next month we have a special designers workgroup in-person meet, anbd so on. All this helps us keep in contact with each other, which helps build trust, but also turns out to lift energy levels and boost production. These meetings are fun.

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Also at these meetings, we learn from each other. One of the big problems in this sector, and one of the reasons people ask ‘why are publishing platforms so hard to build?‘ (after a number of high profile failures), is that there has not been a focused effort to share experiences on how to build publishing platforms. So, that is what we are doing – at each meeting we talk about what we have learned, how we are thinking about things, and show each other what we have done. The last meeting, for example, each xPub platform gave a deep dive to everyone in the group in a process known as speed geeking (it wasn’t so speedy as each table had 25-30 mins to go through their platform).

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So, xPub isn’t a single platform, it’s more the community that is building journal platforms on top of PubSweet and sharing learnings and components. It is a very cool thing.

As a community, we also produced a book entitled ‘PubSweet – how to build a publishing platform’. You can get this for free here – https://coko.foundation/books/

I can also send you a print copy (they look great!) if you send me a postal address.

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The book covers many things – a whole lot of technical documentation for how to build and share components etc, as well as some information about to think about workflow and how to map this into a PubSweet system. Personally, I don’t think the technology is very hard when it comes to building platforms – we knew what we wanted from the beginning with PubSweet and went about and built it (not to downplay the extraordinary job Jure Triglav has done in leading this effort). But the real hard stuff is actually thinking about workflow – not many publishing orgs have had the opportunity to think about designing their workflow to meet exactly what they want (rather than shoe-horning it into an existing system), and so we have had to beat this track for other to follow. It has been quite a journey but the book pretty effectively outlines how to think about workflow (which of course is a process that can be accelerated using Workflow Sprints which is a process I designed to facilitate a publisher to design their own workflow and PubSweet platform in one day).

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In that book you can see some high level ‘architectures’ of each of the xPub platforms such as the following (xpub-collabora):

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Or this (xpub-epmc):

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So, you might be asking…. at what stage of development  are each of these platforms? … I’ll leave it to each of the teams to say exactly, but it has been shocking to see how fast things have come along. I mean, the xPub community only really got together for the first time mid-last year, and building started for most late last year and early this year. It looks like we will have a lot of platforms landing by the end of this year. In this sector that is lightning fast. EBI are particularly impressive – they started two months ago and are almost ready to go – if it weren’t for the fact we are all replacing the under-the-hood data model we designed together at the last PubSweet meet, they would be good to go already. They can achieve such speed because they are reusing a lot of the components that the other teams built before them (and because EBI are just very good 🙂 ).

I can speak a little more about xpub-collabra since that is the platform Coko is building for and with the Collabra Psychology Journal. It’s looking pretty nice. We have some work tidying up the UI, replacing the data model and a few other things, but it’s looking rather good. We are also putting some time into making it a generic platform since the Collabra workflow follows a fairly ‘plain vanilla’ model. So we are building in some management interfaces and various bits and pieces to make it more widely useful – for example, Giannis just built in a Submission Info builder – enabling a Journal admin to build their own submission forms. It requires some hand-holding to use right now, but we’ll shape it to be very usable by your general journal adminy-type. We also have to integrate ORCID and DOIs, extend the range of submission file types etc… but it’s pretty close.

Below is a video showing xpub-collabra in action. It is a a version from some months ago, but you can see the workflow pretty well in this demo.

I think most of the xpub community is going to offer their new platforms to the market in various ways. This will be interesting as there are very different approaches at play. Hindawi, for example, is looking to make their platform a multi-tenant platform, eLife will put JATS at the centre of the workflow etc… So look for more news on that also. For our part, Coko will offer xPub through a partnership with a hosting provider – probably with the same organisations we will work with for Editoria hosting services. Since everything we do is open source, we will also be supplying all the Docker, Helm and Kubernetes scripts so that you can set up your own commercial hosting service if that is your cup of tea (or you can extend your offering should you already be a hosting provider). Coko is pretty close to getting our first hosting partnership set up, so look for news of that soon!

One last thing – because of the modular nature of any platform built on top of PubSweet, it is possible to take any of the xPub platforms and customise it to meet your needs. No need to start building from zero. Additionally, the modularity means you can extend the systems with your own interesting new innovation – finally a place for innovation to call home in the publishing platform world….

So… there is a lot going on in the xPub world….we look quite different to the rest of the market because we are not building one platform – we have instead focused on building a community to support the development of multiple platform solutions for journal workflows. You can pick and choose which one you want, or build something else, reusing as much of the other systems as you can to reduce your development costs (we also spend a lot of time onboarding new folks and supporting them as much as we can).

But it’s not just about improving the game today – supporting the optimisation of workflows is one part of what we are trying to do, the other is to support future innovations.

If you want to know more, feel free to jump into the Coko community channel and chat – https://mattermost.coko.foundation

Come and join the party. We are happy to support you and happy to learn from you…. not-for-profit or commercial we don’t care, build a better journal platform on PubSweet than the rest of us and we’d be happy!  We are in it for the mission – come to talk to us! no preciousness here 🙂

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.