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Keywords: Diffusion of innovation; Scholarly journals; Online publishing; Open source software; Open access publications
Kim Braun is head of the lab for muultimedia and electronic publishing at Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem BIS der Carl von Ossietzky Universitat Oldenburg (Library and Information System of Oldenburg University), Uhlhornsweg 49-55, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
GAP--German Academic Publishers (www.gap-c.de) is a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation, www.dfg.de) for the purpose of creating a new model for academic publishing independent of large commercial publishers. The pricing policy of the large commercial publishers has made it increasingly difficult for universities and university libraries to provide adequate scholarly resources to their students and faculty. This "journal crisis," especially in the area of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals, has led to a number of new approaches to scholarly publishing. GAP is one of them. The project consisted of the formation of an organizational network of academic presses, the necessary infrastructure for online publishing (including a peer-reviewing process), and a business plan to guarantee a sustainable "life" after the project itself has expired.
The project--An overview
This project began in December 2001. Funding of the first two-year phase ended on November 30, 2003, and two follow-up proposals to the DFG to continue the work in both organizational and technical areas have been granted (the GAP II project and the GAPworks project). Founding partners are Regionales Rechenzentrum der Universitat Hamburg (Hamburg University Computing Centre, www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/RRZ), Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Hamburg (State and University Library Hamburg, www.sub.uni-hamburg.de), Universitats-bibliothek Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe University Library, www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de), and the BIS Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universitat Oldenburg (Library and Information System of Oldenburg University, www.bis.uni-oldenburg.de).
Hamburg, as project leader, has the responsibilities of general project management, marketing, building the organizational and business models, as well as the technical work of authentication. Karlsruhe is responsible for setting up and maintaining the website and, later, the GAP portal. Oldenburg was tasked with defining specifications for the required workflow and designing GAPworks, the online publication infrastructure of GAP. The Institute for Science Networking (ISN) at Oldenburg University does the actual programming. Oldenburg's tasks furthermore include building tools to support authors in writing structured documents with a word processor that can later be converted into clean and platform-independent formats...