#PKP5 in Vancouver

Organised in collaboration with Simon Fraser University’s Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab / Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, the fifth Public Knowledge Project scholarly publishing conference (#PKP5) took place from the 11th to the 14th of August 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Attending the conference was indeed a truly unique, privileged and excellent opportunity to engage directly and in real time on the topics related to building open infrastructure and programs for digital humanities, publishing, and libraries.

The conference took place at the impressive SFU Harbour Centre, which most appropriately offers an excellent panoramic view of the city and the surrounding area.

Vancouver’s Harbour Centre, from below

I presented at the conference as part of the #citylis/Ubiquity Press research and development project I lead, Streamlining Deposit, which is funded by Jisc’s Research Dataspring. The scholarly journal I edit, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, relies on the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) for its editorial workflow, and our project’s work is focusing on the development of plug-ins to integrate OJS to research data repositories to enhance the reach, assessment and sustainability of published outputs.

Creating an OJS plugin for depositing articles in repositories #pkp5 @ernestopriego pic.twitter.com/Qaa9rYVwWZ

— Arley Soto (@arleysoto) August 13, 2015

.@ernestopriego speaking on "Streamlining Access: OJS to Repositories Plugin to Enhance Access" #pkp5 pic.twitter.com/oPCahm6vHH

— Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) August 13, 2015

The program of the conference can still be consulted here, and very soon the web site will be updated with recordings of the keynote lectures and the slides of the rest of the talks. Alec Smecher has also posted on the sprint sessions’ results here.

Vancouver is a truly gorgeous city and Simon Fraser University and PKP were incredible hosts. In a day and age in which we take global online communications mostly for granted physical presence is a privilege that when the circumstances are right can provide benefits that remote communication cannot. It was also fantastic to see other Streamlining Deposit team members (Ubiquity Press developers Andy Byers and Mauro Sánchez) collaborate directly with the key experts behind OJS and international editors and scholars that use it for scholarly publishing worldwide. We all came back to the UK turbocharged with insights, new skills and renewed inspiration.

Getting feedback on an OJS development project directly from the community that created, released, maintains and uses OJS was priceless, and it helped us to contrast our own expectations for the project with the perceptions and needs from the community members we talked to.

One of the key messages I took home is that the direct and essential interconnections between open access publishing, libraries and digital humanities is perhaps stronger (and clearer) than ever before, placing libraries and librarians once again, with renewed precision, at the forefront of pioneering attitudes to open access publishing, scholarly communications and digital scholarship.

Many thanks once again to Karen Meijer-Kline, Juan Pablo Alperin and all the organising team at PKP for their kind hospitality and inspiring practical and theoretical insights, and particularly to the always-enlightening Miriam Posner and Ray Siemens for the conversations and their intellectual generosity; their positive, optimistic, pro-active approach to digital humanities scholarship is an example to follow.

Sunset view from the top of Vancouver’s Harbour Centre

References