Serving Innovation in Scholarly Communication with the Open Platform "Digital Peer Publishing"

The internet causes a continuous emergence of novel forms of scholarly communication and collaboration. Electronic publishing provides a means for representing eventual outcomes of these processes, i.e. all types of content such as papers and advanced forms of media. Electronic journals are often chosen as an adequate publishing format because they simultaneously deliver content in a well-known manner but, at the same time, allow extending traditional publishing with innovative features. The initiative Digital Peer Publishing (DiPP) provides technological, organizational and legal frameworks and tools that help to incubate and proliferate such innovative publishing projects. The hosting platform reflects principles of a Service Oriented Architecture. It combines, via Web Services, already established components such as an OAI repository (Fedora) and a Web Content Management System (Plone) with customized workflows for document processing, conversion and distribution. As an open platform it is capable of integrating external tools and services or acts itself as a service provider. It is therefore disposed for supplementing research infrastructures with electronic publishing.