11 August 2020
Coko, a provider of open source publishing solutions in the not-for-profit sector, and Amnet Systems Private Limited a publishing and accessibility services provider, announced a collaboration to fast track projects beneficial to the Open Access Community. The relationship is focused on Emergency Response Publishing (ERP) in response to the global pandemic environment and the aftermath.
The scholarly communications sector needs modern technologies and radically optimized workflows to respond to this current pandemic crisis — ERP is a new Coko project to provide these technologies and improved workflows and pave the way for future modernization of the publishing sector.
To this end, Amnet will dedicate resources to collaborate on the development of Coko’s open source journal platform – Kotahi. Amnet has committed full-time developers to collaborate with the Coko team to accelerate the development of the Kotahi platform.
“This is a one of its kind partnership between a for-profit and a not-for-profit organization with the intention of providing publishers, a highly configurable publishing workflow. We are very excited and look forward to further contributing to the publishing ecosystem” said Aashish Agarwaal, Founder and MD of Amnet.
“The collaboration with Amnet is very exciting. They are a fantastic organisation which beautifully marries mission and business to help the Open Access sector build modern open infrastructure that can be used by everyone. Collaborating on Kotahi with their team to deliver the product to market sooner is what great open source is all about” said Adam Hyde, Founder of Coko.
Kotahi is the 14th open source publishing platform to be built on Coko’s PubSweet. Kotahi is a full featured modern journal platform that can also be used for micropublications and preprints. Kotahi provides mechanisms to concurrently author online, integrate with existing modern publishing services, beautiful theming, realtime chat (via text or video), optimized and swap-able reviewer and review management processes, push button publishing to JATS, and configurable workflows.
“Our vision is to provide better tools and workflows to radically improve academic publishing processes. Kotahi provides significant innovation in the journal platform space and is going to be a very exciting project to launch. It is the modern journal system everyone has been waiting for. Stay tuned!” said Adam Hyde, Founder of Coko.
Adam Hyde says ERP tools such as Kotahi will greatly improve publishing workflows and, over time, grow beyond an emergency response mechanism into a preferred standard of research dissemination.