At Coko we have been building a platform for the management of scholarly articles. It is called Kotahi – a Māori word for ‘unity’. There is a lot of thinking that has gone into this platform – specifically around the notion of a single platform encapsulating multiple publication types and workflows.
The theory is this – publishing, when you take an ‘astronauts’ view of it follows this simple schema:
- create
- improve
- share
All publishing fits into this schema when looking at it from a very high point of view. All of scholarly communications fits into this triplet nicely. What is interesting however, is that many things can fit fit snuggly into this description. OA books, for example, follow this course. As do micropublications, trade paperbacks, preprints etc. Also, interestingly, this is the process we undertake before sharing almost any work – anything written in Google Docs for sharing follows this course.
If we were to lower our altitude and look at scholarly publishing from a birds eye perspective then we start to see some differentiation. We can look, for example at preprints. A preprint workflow is generally as follows:
If we take this same altitude perspective with micropublications it looks something like this:
Finally, journal workflows look something like this:
So, without (yet) going into too many details, Kotahi has been designed to allow flexibility at this altitude. Kotahi is designed to enable all three workflows, meaning that you could use Kotahi to host all three types of publications and workflows in the same system. It is also possible, to use Kotahi for more than this… reviewing books before publishing, conference proceedings, even the submission and review of funding proposals…the scope of application is very broad.
We will be publishing more about this on the Coko site very shortly as Kotahi is approaching a 1.0 beta release. The code is all open source and has been available from the beginning, so you can access it now if you want to set it up and have a look. We will also be announcing a process to sign up for demos – however if you want a sneak peak and would like to give me some feedback about the platform then please ping me at adam@coko.foundation
Also, just to whet your appetite – Kotahi also features some nice things the scholarly communications world has been waiting for including live chat, a interface for creating an editing submission questions, automated live notifications and much more…it really is a pretty wonderful looking approach that I hope will inspire people to pick it up and try and, if they have dev resources, use it as a platform on top of which they can build their own innovations.
