Welcome

Mission

The consortium’s mission is to support software development communities to build free and open source publishing infrastructures.

It is made up of a network of researchers, community groups, and businesses.

The consortium operates as loose research network.

Activities

The consortium’s activities include; research and research publishing, software development, business development, advocacy, publishing, events and peer-learning.

The consortium is open to all areas of publishing. The current priority is interoperability between software platforms in scholarly publishing that are using multi-format and multimedia functionality.

We Connect Platforms

The consortium supports an infrastructural backend software ecology to connect publishing platforms to enable — continuous validation, real-time processing, multi-format outputs and multimedia features.

The objective is to promote design excellence in — authoring systems, publication layout and interface design, librarianship and engineering — to enable diverse and global communities in the pursuit of knowledge creation and dissemination.

Key to the infrastructural approach is a notion of a universal fluid document model based on format transformation aligned to output requirements, rather than fixed format standards. The fluid document model is then combined with a test-driven methodology combining continuous validation and technologies including real-time processing, cryptographic IDs, flat-file storage, Docker virtualisation, encrypted documents and content distribution network APIs.

The goal of the infrastructure is to create a new synthesis of computational automation and human skills and agency, adding next-gen reliability and speed to publication production. In turn this new synthesis will change the use and control of knowledge institutions and industries.

Get Involved

Find us on GitHub or Twitter @pub_con or join us on Gitter chat.

Contact: Simon Worthington, simon AT consortium.io - DM @pub_con