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Notes from the Fedora Users Conference

Last week, I attended the Fedora Users Conference at the University of Virginia. This was the first time that the TOPAZ and PLoS teams had face to face contact with the users and developers of Fedora. There are some great projects that are already using Fedora such as:

DPubS (Digital Publishing System)

Cornell University Library has been developing DPubS, an Open Source ePublishing platform for scholarly publishing. The application has not been released yet, but according to the DPubS development web page, the project will provide for a customizable, end-to-end publishing platform that supports peer review.

DPubS has been on the PLoS radar for quite a while as it supports Project Euclid , which has quite a bit of Open Access content. Obviously, DPubS and TOPAZ have many similar aspects and we hope to work with the DPubS team in the future to provide ePublishining services for Fedora.

NSDL 2.0 and ON RAMP

The NSDL repository is the largest Fedora repository to date and they have really pushed the application to the limit. The NSDL 2.0 project goals are to “create a living library using annotations, comments and collaboration.” Dean Krafft, PI on the NSDL Core Integration Project at Cornell University, explained that they want to create an “architecture of participation, remixable data sources and transformations and harness collective intelligence.” ON RAMP, an NSDL Content and Communications System (NCCS), is an Open Source solution that addresses issues with large scale, complex and distributed content management.

The Arrow project

Andrew Treloar gave a presentation about the Arrow project in Australia. This project is a run by a consortium of universities and already has three active repositories at Monash University, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of New South Wales

The DART project is developing tools to “enable researchers and reviewers to access original and analysed data, collaborate around the creation of research outputs, stored publications, plus add content, annotations and notes.”

In Conclusion

There were many more presentations at the conference (Carol Minton Morris, the NSDL Communications Director, provides another nice write-up on the conference) and it really illustrated that Fedora can be used by many different architectures. Many of these projects are attempting to harness the new collaborative tools of the web (e.g. annotations, comments, folksonomy tags) to create living documents through community involvement. Building PLoS ONE on Fedora will allow us to partner with many of these projects and provide a rich environment for not just PLoS articles but for all applications built on the Fedora information repository.

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