Dear colleagues,

Have you ever needed to find a quick, concise description of an open source scholarly communication tool or service? Have you wished you had a way to compare and contrast scholarly communication tools and services based on features like their organization model, standards adoption, or dependencies? Welcome to our vision for the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat)!

Created by Antleaf, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and the Next Generation Library Publishing project, SComCat is a catalogue and knowledge base of scholarly communication open technologies including software and some essential running services. SComCat’s purpose is to assist potential users in making decisions about which technologies they will adopt by providing an overview of the functionality, organizational models, dependencies, use of standards, and levels of adoption of each technology.

The scan includes tools, platforms, and standards that can be locally adopted to support one or more of the functions of the lifecycle of scholarly communication, which is conceptualized as including the following activities: creation, evaluation, publication, dissemination, preservation, and reuse. The initial data has been drawn from existing sources, including the Mind The Gap report (SFU, MIT)

If you know of a technology or platform that you think should be included in this scan, please use the feedback form located on the SComCat Contribute page.

You can learn more about SComCat and the NGLP project on the Educopia blog.

With many thanks, and very best wishes, 

Hannah (on behalf of the NGLP project team)