PUMA - Project on Academic Publication Management started on August 1st

BibSonomy technology will be used in a project that fosters the open access movement and a better support of the researchers publications work. The project "PUMA - Academic Publication Management" is funded by the German Research Foundation DFG and has been started on August 1st, 2009. PUMA is a joint project of the University Library and the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel.

Open access is a publication model that allows authors to publish their articles free of charge, and users to freely access them. The costs are borne by the institution that is providing the institutional repository. There are several reasons for this publication model. With reduced budgets and increased costs for journals, many university libraries cannot afford the subscription of all relevant journals any longer. Furthermore, open access supports a timely publication and broader visibility of articles so that research results can be taken up earlier and by more researchers, decreasing thus the turn around time of scientific results.

Even though many researchers support the open access movement in principle, they often do not contribute their publications to the institutional repository of their university. Key reasons are that they do not see an immediate benefit from this additional effort, and that the upload is not integrated in their usual work flow. PUMA aims therefore for an integrated solution, where the upload of a publication results automatically in an update of both the personal and institutional homepage, the creation of an entry in BibSonomy, an entry in the academic reporting system of the university, and its publication in the institutional repository. At the time of upload, meta data from several data sources (SHERPA/RoMEO list, online library catalogue, BibSonomy) will be collected automatically in order to support the user. Further, PUMA aims to provide a publication management platform for all researchers and students to be used on a daily basis, which reduces not only the open access publication effort but also the effort to manage one's own publications.

The PUMA platform will be based on BibSonomy technology and will be hosted by the University Library; it will be setup in a Web 2.0 style. The platform will include all features known from BibSonomy, like tagging of publications, easy usage, an API and scalability. BibSonomy will continue to be run by the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group. As a showcase, PUMA will be integrated with the open access repository platform DSpace, the libary system PICA, the Typo3 content management system, and BibSonomy. The system is open for adaption to other standard systems. The project results will be published as open source software. This implies that the complete BibSonomy source code will become available under an open source licence at the end of the project.

Feature of the Week: PUMA II

We are happy to announce that we could attract a followup funding for the very successful PUMA project. PUMA is a clone of BibSonomy, meant for local installations of universities, libraries or research institutes. It allows like BibSonomy to collect and share bookmarks and publications. It has additional features like an guided export to an institutinal repository or an integration into the OPAC system of the library.
As you may already know PUMA builds on top of the BibSonomy technology and most of the developments made within PUMA II will be available as new BibSonomy features. The project started at the beginning of February and will run one year with an option for a second year. For PUMA II, the DMIR from the university of Würzburg group joined the team consisting otherwise of the KDE group and the library the University of Kassel.

One major goal of the project is to establish a community around PUMA. To reach this we aim for other institutions which will host the PUMA system like the library at our university. Further, we will work on a lot of new features. Here a short list which provides an overview:

• community entries for publications with wiki like versioning and audited entries,
• better integration into third party systems like moodle and typo3 (new or improved plugins),
• single sign on and Shibboleth authorization,
• improved frontend and better support pages,
• better open social support,
• the integration of ping back and
• a new concept to improve the functionality for groups.

Beside all these features we are working on a business plan to support other institutions running a PUMA system. Please contact us if you are interested.

In the near future we will report progress of the project and of course all details on the new features.

Happy tagging
Andreas