The University of Virginia is pleased to announce a two-year award in the amount of $1,000,000 from Arcadia—a charitable fund of philanthropists Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—in support of the "Advancing Hyku: Open Source Institutional Repository Platform Development" project.
Through this project, the University of Virginia and its partner institutions—Ubiquity Press and the British Library—will support the growth of open access through institutional repositories. Working with the global open infrastructure community, the partners will introduce significant structural improvements and new features to the Samvera Community's Hyku Institutional Repository platform.
Beginning in October 2019, the "Advancing Hyku" project team will make the open source community institutional repository product Hyku a more attractive dissemination option by:
- integrating open-resource discovery tools (e.g. Unpaywall, Open Access Button) to automatically scale repository contents.
- adding metrics to indicate usage of contents (e.g. citations, social media).
- connecting and syncing with author identification and profile services (e.g. ORCID).
- encouraging interaction with contents through in-browser display, visualization and annotation.
- establishing pathways to long-term preservation services.
- assessing requirements and jointly creating detailed, component-specific development plans, resulting in the collaborative development of new capabilities.
All code will be released open source, to be merged with the Hyku core codebase in accord with the Samvera Community's practices. To deliver these changes, the University of Virginia Library and the British Library are working alongside fellow Samvera community member Ubiquity Press. The libraries will represent the expertise and interests of research and knowledge institutions in the project, while Ubiquity will perform most of the technical development in close coordination with these community partners.
"We're excited that Arcadia is supporting this significant upgrade of the Hyku platform, the next generation of open source institutional repository software used by libraries and memory institutions worldwide, including UVA," said John Unsworth, Dean and University Librarian at the University of Virginia. "Advancing Hyku will make it much easier for authors to make their work openly available through their institutional repository and safeguard the long-term preservation of their work."
"Knowledge has always been shared and preserved through community infrastructures such as libraries," explains Torsten Reimer, Head of Research Services at the British Library. "This makes it important for libraries to be actively involved in digital infrastructures like repositories, to contribute to a sustainable open knowledge environment."
"For many years now, institutional repositories have struggled both for adoption by researchers, and to deliver on the promise of green open access for the academic community, funders, and the broader public," says Brian Hole, CEO of Ubiquity. "We believe that we can use our experience as publishers in this project and help Hyku repositories achieve the tipping point and become places valued by scholars for more broadly disseminating their work."
The University of Virginia and its partner institutions are deeply appreciative of Arcadia's generous support of this work. For more information, contact Ellen Ramsey, Director, Scholarly Repository Services, University of Virginia, at ellen@virginia.edu.
About The University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is an iconic public institution of higher education, boasting nationally ranked schools and programs, diverse and distinguished faculty, a major academic medical center, and a proud history as a renowned research university. The University of Virginia Library is a founding member of the Samvera Community.
Learn more at www.virginia.edu, www.library.virginia.edu and samvera.org.
About Ubiquity Press
Ubiquity Press is both an unconditionally open access publisher and an open publishing platform used by over 35 university presses and libraries as members of the Ubiquity Partner Network. Seeing the need for an open next-generation repository as an alternative to proprietary systems, Ubiquity began working with Hyku in 2018. Ubiquity Press is a member of the Samvera Community.
Learn more at www.ubiquitypress.com and www.u-repo.io.
About The British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world's greatest research libraries. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilization and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers, websites, datasets and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. The British Library is a member of the Samvera Community.
Learn more at www.bl.uk.
About Arcadia
Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $663 million in grants to projects around the world.
Learn more at www.arcadiafund.org.uk.