The German Academic Publishers Project - Gap

German Academic Publishers (GAP, www.gap-c.de) is a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Science Foundation, www.dfg.de) for the purpose of creating a new model for academic publishing. Activities commenced in December 2001 and funding is secure for two years; a follow-up proposal requesting an extension of funding for additional developments and integration will be submitted to the DFG. The project is not centered around research and development activities but is rather an infrastructure project. Goals of the project include creation of an organizational network of academic presses and other (in the sense of GAP) eligible publishing institutions, creation of a business plan to guarantee a sustainable “life” for GAP after funding expires and establishing the necessary infrastructure for onlinepublishing (including a peer-reviewing process) and on-line management of persons, roles and other elements of the publishing-process. Core-partners in the project are Hamburg University Computing Center, State and University Library Hamburg, University Library Karlsruhe and the Library and Information System of the Oldenburg University. In the course of the project other partners have joined GAP to evaluate it as well as to contribute expertise in areas not covered by the original partners. Thus far the network has been set up and organized with a so-called Back Office at the center of the cooperation. The Back Office provides technical services such as running the publication system and offering OAI-compatible export of metadata and document storage, but at the same time it is to serve as a Center of Competence to universities planning to found their own academic university presses. The members and partners of GAP are the so-called Front Offices, using the infrastructure of GAP. Front Offices can be academic presses, learned societies, universities as a whole or faculties and departments, even individual scientists. The Front Offices customers – the authors – process their publications through GAPware, GAP’s on-line publication system. This will ensure speedy processing and return scientific publication to one of its original goals: scientific communication. All the more so, as one of GAP’s aims is to make what is published through its channels freely available on the internet. GAPware is the on-line publication system developed in Oldenburg and programmed for GAP by the Institute for Science Networking. Features include – naturally – the entire publication process, publication-container management, author and peer-reviewer management, an elaborate peer-reviewing element, as well as in the future a pre-publication and a print-on-demand option. GAPware is in a beta-stage, but will be refined further in the upcoming months. The most imminent work within the project is the development of a business plan to ensure sustainability for GAP beyond the original financing by the German Science Foundation (DFG)