In 2025, the University of Ottawa Library was approached by an affiliated professor whose academic society, the Society for Transparency, Openness, and Replication in Kinesiology (STORK), was about to lose funding for hosting its publishing activities on Open Monograph Press (OMP), Open Journal Systems (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS). Initially, the professor asked if the library could provide financial support. However, since the library already hosted journals on OJS, it made more sense to migrate over the journal. The problem, though, was that at the time, the uOttawa Library did not operate instances of OMP or OPS, and with a constrained budget, setting up new platforms with additional costs seemed uncertain. To the rescue comes the consortia model! Leveraging the library’s membership with Scholars Portal and its shared infrastructure approach, the library was able to implement new instances of OMP and OPS at no additional cost and begin migrating STORK’s publishing activities. Sounds simple, right? In reality, it was doable but not seamless. We encountered technical hurdles, it required additional staff time to sort out and develop new internal workflows as well as devote time to training, and we learned valuable lessons along the way. In this session, we will provide an overview of the project, share lessons learned, and discuss the partnership between the library and the consortium, including the roles we each played. For this project, the shared infrastructure model proved essential to sustaining STORK’s three open publishing activities using the Public Knowledge Project’s software and highlights how consortia models can support sustainability for openness, with benefits like reducing costs, distributing workload across the teams, minimizing technical burden, and enabling knowledge sharing across teams.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all but one of the watch party 2 presentations. The link to view From Vulnerabilities to Verification is different; see the presentation's description for the link to view.
Video Stream