Finding the Right Platform: A Report on Building a Publishing Platform Crosswalk

: This Report from the Field introduces a collaboratively authored set of documentation that compares digital publishing platforms that are typically used by library publishers. This report discusses how we created this set of crosswalks that compare 10 publishing platforms, most of which are academy-owned and open-source. These platforms are used to create eBooks, digital humanities projects, journals, collections, and community projects


INTRODUCTION
A key job responsibility for many library publishers is to collaborate with authors to determine the best mechanisms to share and publish their research.Open-access publishing has been on library publishers' radars for over two decades, and the types of publishing that librarians are responsible for has expanded from PDFs in Institutional Repositories to faculty and student journals, digital humanities projects, and open educational resources.Further, authors and editors are interested in publishing their work digitally and openly with innovative content, including interactive elements and multimedia.While there are numerous commercial or open-source platforms available for publishing research (i.e., bePress, Drupal, WordPress), the number of academy-owned oraffiliated publishing platforms has flourished in the last five years, and the choices can feel overwhelming to librarians, let alone authors and editors.Documentation exists for these platforms, but only in minimal and siloed forms, such as the aggregated report, "Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms" (Maxwell et al., 2019), which focuses on the technical aspects of platforms, not the features of interest to end-users.Individual publishing platforms' websites sometimes include documentation, but knowing where to find it is only clear if an end-user already knows about the platform.So, then, how do potential users find out about which platforms may be available?This Report from the Field discusses a recognized need to create documentation that showcases multiple academy-owned publishing platforms at a glance, to help library publishers better choose which platforms might be right for their projects.Our paper will cover the platforms we chose (and why), what documentation and criteria we looked at for each, how we decided to design the crosswalk, outcomes of user-testing, how and where we decided to release the documentation in collaboration with other entities, and what future plans may be in store for adding additional platforms to this CC-BY licensed project.

LITERATURE REVIEW
In 2014-15, the Mellon Foundation initiated a several-years-long grant-making effort for universities (specifically targeting university presses) to build digital publishing platforms that would aid with long-form scholarly production and publication.The need for infrastructure to publish digital books and book-like objects had become a huge stumbling block in the growth of digital publishing for the humanities.The focus in digital publishing, until that point, had been on journals and repositories (sometimes using one and the same platform, i.e., bepress).However, Mellon's mission was focused on humanities disciplines where journal publishing still holds second place to book/monograph publishing; thus, platforms like Open Journal Systems that focus almost exclusively on journal publishing are useful only to a limited extent.In 2014, no platform existed that could handle book publishing with the same fluidity and turn-key workflows the way OJS offered journals.And, thus Mellon's grantmaking project to provide funding for university presses (as a primary location for humanities book production) and other organizations to build book platforms was meant to infuse scholarly publishing with infrastructural innovation that could radically change the publishing landscape.
Between the then-named Scholarly Communications grantmaking program that specifically targeted university presses and consortia and a more open-ended round of grant funding for related digital publishing projects, Mellon awarded "nearly ten million dollars in total" in 2014-15 alone (Maxwell, Bordini, & Shamash, 2017), with the total funding to similar projects in the last ten years going well beyond ten million.

As reported in Inside Higher Ed,
The [Mellon] foundation's proposed solution is for groups of university presses to work together on testing new business models for publishing digital works, or tackle any of the moving parts that task is comprised of, including "(a) editing; (b) clearing rights to images and multimedia content; (c) the interaction of the publication on the Web with primary sources and other related materials; (d) production; (e) pre-and post-publication peer review; (f) marketing; (g) distribution; and (h) maintenance and preservation of digital content."(Straumsheim, 2015;see also, "Mellon Foundation Awards," 2015).
After being tasked by the Mellon Foundation to report on the collection of Mellon-funded publishing projects, Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing co-authors John Maxwell, Alessandra Bordini, and Katie Shamash (2017) published their final report comparing 13 platforms.They wrote, "The thirteen projects considered here address all of these issues [listed in the quote above] and more.No two projects are truly alike -though there are numerous interesting alignments."(Maxwell, Bordini, & Shamash, 2017).
An imaginary Venn diagram of the digital publishing platforms they reported on would be messy indeed, as many of them share some features, but each also has a unique perspective to long-form and book publishing, which makes choosing the right platform an elusive challenge for potential users.As documentation gets written and rewritten and as platforms evolve in their opensource environments, the platform developers and hosts-made of personnel in university presses and libraries, as well as industry-situated software developers, in some cases-it's not surprising that these intentionally non-commercial or non-profit platforms are still working to create marketing materials that help spread the word of their capabilities.And a tool that would help endusers (authors, librarians, publishers, etc.) choose from amidst the range of options certainly isn't on the radar (or budget) for any individual platform publisher.
The need for such a tool was stated well by panelists at the 2023 Library Publishing Coalition presentation on Brown University Library's NEH Institute on digital scholarship titled, "A Model for Diversifying and Expanding Digital Publishing."In that panel, scholar Ashley Robertson Preston said, Prior to this institute, I knew very little about digital publications… I have an idea [for a digital publication] but I don't really know how to bring it to life.And that's what the Institute helped me to understand, how to bring it to life.(Library Publishing Coalition, 39:37-57) The NEH institute was a hybrid, three-week summer course run in 2022 by Allison Levy, Brown's Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University Library.Fifteen scholars from HBCU and under-resourced colleges and universities who had a digital-first project could apply to attend and have all their institute fees covered.(This institute is in the same thematic vein as most of NEH's Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities digital scholarship offerings over the last 15 years-still, a much-needed topic to be covered for authors, and Brown has received another round of funding to run this institute again; see "Brown," 2023.)During the course, participants were introduced to, among others, Manifold and Scalar, two of the platforms we cover in the crosswalk (discussed later in this article).During the Q&A, one panelist said she wished she knew these platforms existed before the institute-marking the need for making this kind of information more accessible, not just to a few institute attendees at various sponsored workshops, but in formats that are accessible across institutional and academic affiliation.
In the Duke University Libraries' "A Framework for Library Support of Expansive Digital Publishing," the authors state that a key challenge in supporting publications, including digital humanities projects and ebooks, is "late-stage intervention" ("Planning, " Hansen et. al, 2019).That is, libraries and presses often find out about a digital publishing project after an author has made critical design choices that the infrastructural support at an institution may not be able to support.They also offer an extended discussion of how libraries (as a primary stakeholder in digital publishing projects on campus) can support authors through outreach and communication efforts: Outreach and communication.Cultivating faculty awareness of relevant library services, as well as services offered by other campus units, helps to signal that expansive digital publications stand out as a distinctive category of publishing with special support needs.… For example, in addition to expansive digital publications as a general category, libraries should develop rubrics for subcategories of publications, with documented examples.Such a taxonomy would allow institutions to develop and communicate specific support structures around different publication types.Clear categorization also indicates that libraries know something about how publications will develop and, as a result, understand appropriate ways to support their success.("Planning, " Hansen et. al, 2019) This recommendation is useful in our experience.However, creating a taxonomy of all potential publishing platforms as a way to show faculty scholars their features and indicate ways the library can support authors is a big ask.Yet, that's a gap we have intended to mind with this collaborative, feature-forward and genre-forward crosswalk of open-source digital publishing platforms.

BACKGROUND
This project idea came during an NEH panel on The Futures of Digital Scholarship, held in May 2022.In the fall of 2022, the idea resurfaced during a Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) community call on non-traditional publications, and work began during the LPC's Documentation Month in February 2023.The goal was to get as much done on a few, key platforms during documentation month and call it a win.As a collaboration between librarians Corinne Guimont and Matt Vaughn and digital publishing specialist Cheryl E. Ball grew, so did our parameters on scope.We met weekly (and later, bi-weekly) to identify several common publishing/digital scholarship platforms -Fulcrum, Manifold, Scalar, OJS, Janeway, and others -and researched basic documentation on each of them across a specific set of user-needs criteria.Criteria included publication and content types, what's possible to ingest or embed, hosting services, preservation and export options, and more.We also identified, when possible, what makes one platform stand out from another, especially when they fall into similar publishing realms (i.e., books vs. journals vs. collections).
Throughout, our goal was to collect enough research to help librarians, publishers, and authors make a decision to further pursue one platform over another (or to further research a smaller group of platforms that might be suitable for their projects), and then to design a set of materials that would quickly assist readers in making those choices.In May 2023, we presented on the progress of our work at the Library Publishing Forum and sought feedback to incorporate into the final crosswalk.Ultimately, we have created a tool highlighting ten common platforms, with tables comparing the user-needs criteria based on publication type (e.g., book, journal, DH project) and detailed one-pagers for each platform with commonly sought out information and links to detailed documentation.

CHOOSING PLATFORMS & CRITERIA
Our first steps were choosing the platforms to highlight.(None of us have any affiliation with any of these platforms.We have, however, collaborated with several platform stakeholders on related publishing projects, which lends towards our expertise in producing this crosswalk.)We began by choosing platforms that were regularly discussed in the library publishing world, those that we were personally interested in, and those that we were often asked about.This led to an early list including Fulcrum, Manifold, Scalar, Omeka, and OJS (Open Journal System).We then discussed adding Humanities Commons, Pressbooks, and WordPress as they are all related in that they incorporate WordPress technology into their development or service offerings.We decided on including Pressbooks and Humanities Commons due to their direct focus on producing and sharing scholarly and pedagogical content, but decided not to include WordPress as the platform itself can be and is used for such a wide range of reasons outside of academia.
However, as we dove in, and we started finding documentation, we ended up adding more platforms to cover the variety of publication types we were looking at.For example, we had OJS to look at journals but we did not have another journal management system to compare and that is when we added Janeway and PubPub, as two platforms rising in usage in digital publishing.We had also included Humanities Commons but didn't have another platform that lent itself to being like a public repository, so we added Mukurtu to complement that.Our final ten platforms include Throughout the documentation month and during our presentation at the Library Publishing Forum, several other platforms were suggested.However, we chose to stick with these 10 platforms to align with our goal of looking at academy owned platforms.Additionally, while there are new platforms in development, we also chose to focus on those that have been in use for a bit to accurately represent the platform's capabilities.As the final output of this research is openaccess and Creative-Commons licensed, we encourage interested parties to build upon our work to add platforms as they develop over time.
Once we had the platforms chosen, we had to determine what we were looking for with each platform.The main idea that we wanted to highlight across the board was what makes the platform stand out from the others and why someone might want to choose one platform over another for any given project.Next, we sought out general information that can sometimes become a deciding factor.This included criteria such as hosting options, additional services, and licensing.Realistically, librarians and library publishers do need to make decisions on platforms based on what they have access to and that may include cost, technical expertise, and more.From there, we took a deeper look at the additional services for exporting, archiving and preservation, interactivity, and ingestion options.For the ingestion options, we specifically looked at both uploading a full book or project and uploading individual files as media.Ultimately, we ended up with the following list of criteria: We also added sections to address the following questions • What can you use it for?
• What makes it stand out? and included links to existing documentation.Other criteria were considered but left out, including branding options, developer contributions, and migration options.We found that with many of these topics, so much depended on the individual install of a platform and how it was configured when set up on a local server or by the platform itself.
Next, we began to group the platforms and criteria into specific categories based on the publication type because we felt that this was the way authors and publishers would seek out whether to use a platform or not.The publication types these platforms primarily worked with included eBooks, digital humanities projects, journals, collections, and community projects.

eBooks
We identified the following platforms as a way to publish an eBook.This was arguably the most popular publication type across the ten platforms.
These platforms all publicize themselves as able to create or publish digital books.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS
DH Projects presented the most difficult publication type to identify as so much of a DH project depends on how the author/creator identifies their own work.To categorize platforms into this area, we relied on tools that are common in the field of DH, our own expertise, and tools that may have identified DH within their website or documentation.We ultimately decided on the following platforms, though others could certainly also host DH projects of various types:

JOURNALS
Like eBooks, journals were also fairly straightforward in that many of the platforms identified themselves as a Journal Management tool.The platforms we identified included: This was an area where our research while building the crosswalk allowed us to identify additional platforms.When originally identifying platforms, we only included OJS and Janeway for journals, but after diving into the documentation for each tool, we found that Manifold and PubPub also support journals.

COLLECTIONS
Like DH Projects, collections is a somewhat vague publication type.For the purposes of the crosswalk, we identified collections as a grouping of digital materials that could be presented as a book companion site with digital assets, a gallery or online exhibition site, or the like.This area was not one of our original publication types, but after looking closely at the different platforms, we chose to add it.The platforms that could primarily be used to host collections include:

COMMUNITY PROJECTS
Community projects are those that allow users to contribute to the publication or project.We added this category during our research when we realized that Mukurtu, in particular, was intended to be used with non-academic audiences.Platforms in this category include features that allow users to comment or upload content in a way designed to benefit a large, potentially public (or privacylimited) community.Like with nearly all of our publication-type delineations, several other platforms not listed here could fall into this category as well.However, the ones we chose to focus on in Community Projects, because of their highest potential for this work, included:

BUILDING THE CROSSWALK
During the February 2023 LPC Documentation Month, we collected data every Friday from 3 to 4pm ET.What started as weekly study halls during documentation month turned into a sevenmonth project where we met bi-weekly from March-June and then weekly again in July and August (moving to Tuesdays during the summer so as to avoid a late-Friday summertime meeting).Our co-working goal was to only work on this project during our meetings, and to not have any homework between meetings.We are happy to report we were mostly successful at meeting that goal.
Much of this data collection involved simple web searches, usually informed by whatever knowledge we may or may not have already had about the platforms we were researching.In some cases, we had access to demos, test sites, or live examples of these platforms through our work, allowing us to gather information about their functionality firsthand.As frequent users of some of these platforms, we were also able to draw on our knowledge of where some of the most useful guides and documentation existed on the web.We collected our research in a shared Google Doc (See Fig. 1).In the end, we were able to pull together a great deal of useful information about the strengths, weaknesses, and salient features of these platforms.Once the data had been gathered, we began looking for potential gaps and refining and organizing it to reflect what we felt would be most useful to those researching publishing options.One of the challenges of bringing our data into this crosswalk was distilling it enough to suit the at-a-glance usability we had envisioned while still retaining enough information to be useful.As a result, we decided to give each platform its own "one-pager."These one-page sections of the crosswalk elaborate on the functionality of a specific platform, allowing users to get an at-a-glance, one-page overview of it.
Once we had pulled all this data together and organized it, we began planning our next steps.We continued to meet every other week on Fridays following the February documentation month.For these subsequent meetings, we sometimes had very realistic goals for researching and enhancing our data for a specific platform.Other times, our goals were overly ambitious-like attempting to finalize the design of this crosswalk tool in one hour.And while we failed in that attempt, some of the other challenges we gave ourselves proved surprisingly achievable.We were, for instance, able to draft and submit a publication-ready abstract for this project in under an hour.
In mid-March, we invited Brandon Locke, whom we knew had gone through a similar design process with the LPC's Journal Workflows project and its massive data set, to provide feedback on the crosswalk design.His suggestions and questions were inspiring.And we talked about similar design tactics such as the defunct DiRT (Digital Research Tools) Directory ( 2018), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) visual flowcharts ( 2023), and other at-a-glance style documents for publishing projects.We discussed what the core question should be that the documentation would answer and what the needs of our potential audiences might be.Then, we created several use-cases and user scenarios that helped us determine three possible deliverables: 1.An introductory page that explains the project and provides a table of contents for exploring the crosswalk with big-picture questions such as "What kind of project do you want to publish?" 2. A project type (genre)-based table where users can compare the platforms that fall under each project type.3. A feature-based table where each feature (e.g., Hosting, Interactivity, Export Options, etc.) is compared across all platforms.
After our meeting with Brandon, we crafted a wireframe of what this expanded version of the crosswalk might look like (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Caption: A wireframe of our basic design with an introductory page linking to our project type and feature-based tables and to one-page descriptions of the platforms we researched.The tables also link to each other with, for instance, the Manifold row in the eBooks section linking to the one-page, at-a-glance description of Manifold.
At this point in the process, we realized we forgot to create a DH genre category, which we knew we would need because many digital publishing librarians field questions about creating or hosting DH projects.As noted in Figure 2, we delimited platforms for DH projects to those "Out of the Box," meaning that we weren't going to tackle any variety of open-source DH projectbuilding tool or language, as the vastness of that undertaking (e.g., the inclusion of custom-built and HTML/CSS/JS, etc.) would be too onerous.This helped us reconfirm our focus on academyowned or -related open-source platforms that have as close to turn-key usage as possible.
Also from this wireframing process, we realized we needed to link the one-pagers that listed all of the features and criteria for each platform individually-which would be especially helpful for users who might be familiar with a platform name, but not necessarily all that it did.Including this list of platforms on the introductory page also allowed users to quickly see which platforms were included.
During the meeting with Brandon, we realized that our "little" project that was meant to be only a few pages had turned into a much longer project, and that navigation and design would be an issue.For the ease of creation and re-use, we decided to build the entire crosswalk in Google Docs and export it as linked PDFs that would have a readable, but minimal design.Our primary goal was to make the information available quickly and as openly licensed as possible to allow for continued updates by us or others at a later time.

DESCRIPTION OF THE CROSSWALK
This crosswalk tool begins with the introductory page that contains a hyperlinked table of contents pointing users to the three sections of the crosswalk: project types, features, and platforms.The table of contents is organized around common questions that arise when evaluating publishing platforms: (1) What kind of project do you want to publish?; (2) What features are you looking for?; and (3) What does a particular platform do?The table of contents is followed by an introduction that explains the purpose of the tool and how to use it (See Fig. 3).Fig. 3. Caption: An early draft of our introduction or table of contents page for the crosswalk organized by questions about the kind of project a user might be interested in, the features they might want, and the platforms they might want to learn more about.

PROJECT TYPES
Users interested in the project types can start by selecting the type of project they want to pursue, and this takes them to a comparison table listing all of the platforms that are appropriate for that project type.They can choose from eBooks, DH Projects, Journals, Collections, or Community Projects.Publishers interested in creating eBooks, for instance, can look at the eBook comparison table and see that they have the option of using Manifold, Fulcrum, Pressbooks, Scalar, Janeway, or PubPub.If a user clicks on Journals in the crosswalk, that hyperlink will take them to a table that lists all the platforms that are appropriate for publishing scholarly journals and compares their features (see Fig. 4).Our genre tables are designed to give users an at-a-glance overview of the features offered by platforms that support particular types of publishing, allowing them to make easy comparisons and quickly get a sense of which platform might be best for their needs.

FEATURES
The features section of the crosswalk allows users to compare how different platforms manage basic digital publishing features.This crosswalk investigates the following features: Hosting & Cost, Ingestion Options, Editorial Workflows, Interactivity, Archive & Preservation, Export Options, Discoverability, and Accessibility.
If a user is interested in a particular feature, they can access the feature crosswalk either from the table of contents section, "What features are you looking for?" or from one of the linked column headers in the project-type crosswalk (as "Hosting options" and "Ingestion options" show in Fig. 4).Clicking the feature link will take them to the crosswalk that compares all platforms' options for that one feature.If a publisher wanted to compare the editorial workflow features of OJS and Janeway, for example, they could find and click the column header labeled "editorial workflow" in the Journals crosswalk and be taken to the Editorial Workflows crosswalk to scan and compare that feature for each platform.In another example, clicking Export Options links to the table that explains how each platform manages this feature and could note, for instance, that all exports from Manifold, Fulcrum, Pressbooks, and PubPub all convert to EPUB (see Fig. 5).Fig. 5. Caption: The Export Options feature table, which lists all export options for every platform in the crosswalk.

ONE-PAGERS
The one-pagers for each platform include a brief description, a link to the platform homepage, a link to the "Mind the Gap" report where brief technical information about each platform can be found, links to example projects and institutional host documentation (including source code), and short descriptors indicating what each platform can be used for and what makes it stand out from other platforms (see Fig. 6).(The latter was generated by the authors, based on their usage and research, and checked by the platform builders.)The Open Journal Systems one-pager, for example, explains that OJS is distinguished by its longevity, active user community, and by robust metrics and usage tracking.These one-pagers allow users to quickly narrow down which platforms will meet their needs.If, for instance, a publisher is only able to do local hosting, they can immediately narrow their options to the platforms that offer local hosting (using the Hosting link on the one-pager to get back to that all-platforms feature table) and start comparing how those platforms address their other requirements.

REVIEWING AND SHARING OUR WORK
Once we had finished researching the 10 platforms and editing the content for findability and readability within the crosswalks, we sent PDFs of the one-pagers to each platform host for review.This was the first contact we had with most hosts, and for some the first they were learning about this project.To a platform, we received a few minor updates or clarifications (if something is missing in the platform crosswalk, it's because-as far as we know and checked with the developers-it doesn't exist yet for that platform) and many hearty thank yous for putting this project together.We are grateful that this work was received so well, even while in draft form, by those whose work we want to highlight.
It wasn't until the very end of our collaboration that we finally decided where to share this crosswalk.We began by thinking about different repositories where we could share this work, including our own institutions, and we chose Humanities Commons because it does represent a neutral third party that is not tied to any of us specifically, which mirrors our personal interests in collaboratively built projects.Additionally, our hope in hosting it outside of our institutions is that members of the library publishing and digital scholarship communities will find it more accessible and be more comfortable with building on and adapting our work.The link for accessing the crosswalk in Humanities Commons is https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:59231.
A common question we have gotten throughout this process has been: "What about when platforms change?"And to that our hope is that the community continues to build upon this work to help update the platforms in the crosswalk and add others.Platforms come and go, and needs for scholars change over time, but having this framework to use and build on will, hopefully, help future scholars and library publishers make decisions in producing scholarship.Throughout this process, our aim has been to create a crosswalk for the community that others can build upon and that we do not necessarily own.Our other hope is that this crosswalk can help platform developers as they build on existing tools or create new ones to consider features and services that better support the library publishing community, or to better document services that exist and aren't as well known.For example, if one platform is lacking in the area of preservation and looking for ways to grow, they might be able to use the crosswalk to easily see what other, similar platforms are doing.
During a 2023 LPF panel where we introduced the crosswalk and the process of creating it, one attendee mentioned that OPERAS [Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Areas for the Social Sciences and Humanities] is working on a similar service, called Pathfinder.This service is still in alpha and was scheduled to be released in Spring 2023 in beta, but the website is not active yet, so we ask readers to stay tuned to that development as well for (perhaps) a more sophisticated tool that will include "a presentation of the [scholarly communication] services as a catalog, and a wizard that walks researchers through a series of questions towards the service offering that best fits their needs" (Pathfinder-OPERAS, n.d.).In the meantime, we offer this set of crosswalks, entitled "Finding the Right Platform," for your use.

Fig. 1 :
Fig. 1: This screenshot shows examples of our in-progress notes taken during data collection.We included licensing information and links to documentation, example projects, and any other useful information we could find.

Fig. 4 .
Fig. 4. Caption: Screenshot of the Journals genre type comparison table, showing side-by-side comparisons of the hosting options and ingestion options for OJS and Janeway.

Fig. 6 .
Fig. 6.Caption: Sample (excerpted) one-pager from Mukurtu showing some top-level information with embedded links to further resources and the feature set for that individual platform.