Infrastructure and technology

The TIB is Major Development Partner of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The two organizations will cooperate on many levels in the coming years. PKP is a key player for a sustainable and diverse open-access landscape. In particular, the development of Open Journal Systems (OJS) is important for the publication of OA journals under academic control, in different organizational configurations and many different languages. We support the work of PKP and the associated community through our collaboration and input. In doing so, we contribute TIB's expertise as a central specialized library with innovative research and development interests and a strong commitment to open access and open science.

TIB Open Publishing will be able to offer the new features developed within this framework at an early stage. We will bring our experience gained from our own publishing activities to the cooperation with PKP, and our publishing practice will benefit from the close connection to PKP.

For us, it is important that the PKP software is released as free software – not just gratis, but actually free for all to reuse, adapt, etc. At a time when critical infrastructure and important services for open access and for scholarly publishing are often without sustainable funding, and when non-free services are often used with little concern, we are consciously contributing to a better approach. We use open source tools whenever possible, for example the free software GitLab as software development lifecycle tool for our own software developments.

To operate TIB Open Publishing, we use the open source software OJS (version 3.3.) from PKP. We keep OJS and the underlying software infrastructure constantly updated to provide state-of-the-art technical support.

We will actively participate in the further development of the free software and in networking with the community. We have a particular focus, in coordination with PKP, on adapting OJS for conference publications and persistent identifier support.

To improve support for organizational identifiers, we developed ROR support for OJS. This development was done in two separate steps and released to the community:

The plugin allows adding institutes from the ROR register and autocompletion of multilingual names, provided that they are maintained in the ROR register. This plugin is integrated into the OJS plugin gallery.

The unique identification of digital resources is a high priority for TIB Open Publishing. Each article or contribution receives a DOI. We register DOIs via Crossref. By using the Profile OJS ORCID Plugin we offer authors the possibility to connect to their ORCID profile. All serial publications receive an eISSN.

The long-term archiving of digital open-access content is relevant for the availability and reusability of this content and is mentioned as an important basic principle e.g. in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

Articles and contributions published in journals or conference publications that fall within the subject spectrum of the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) are archived via the TIB's long-term archiving system. The long-term archiving software Rosetta from the manufacturer ExLibris is used for this purpose. The TIB hosts and administers the digital preservation system in its own computer center, among other things, and offers archiving as a service to its partners and customers. The TIB sees long-term archiving as a permanent task, without time limits. To this end, it has developed preservation strategies that are always adapted to current circumstances. The TIB's long-term archiving system has been certified several times and guarantees both the preservation of the data stream and the preservation of the functionality of the stored data. Further information can be found on the web pages on digital long-term archiving of the TIB.

Articles and contributions published in journals or conference publications that do not fall within the subject spectrum of the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) are archived through our partner Portico. Portico is a system for long-term archiving of digital objects developed by the US non-profit organization Ithaka. It secures access to electronic journals, e-books and digital collections so that the content remains accessible and usable in the future.

As part of the mandatory delivery, we deliver all published content in electronic form to the German National Library (DNB). For this purpose, we use the OJS DNB Export Plugin.

Plagiarism, i.e. using the thoughts and works, even small pieces, of another person without providing appropriate credit, is fraudulent. In order to detect plagiarism prior to publication, we use iThenticate provided via Similarity Check of Crossref for screening submitted manuscripts.