The Hybrid Publishing Consortium (HPC) is a research project who's mission is to support the development of open source software for public infrastructures in publishing.

A goal as part of this mission is to lower the cost of innovation for publishers allowing them to carry out their own research and experiments, with the added benefit of open source code and knowledge contributions back to a scalable public infrastructure.

A second goal is to bring the ideal of universal access to independent publishing, as is taking place in scholarly publishing with the Open Access (OA) movement. We recognise that this is a political issue, involving–policy, economics and technology, which needs multi-stakeholder agreement to move technology developments forward.

 

HPC has three tracks to it's research:

 

Examining publishing workflow and identifying open source projects to support these varied workflows.Building software for multi-format transformation based on a ‘single source’ architecturesPromoting an 'application framework' and API model to allow interoperability between open source providersHPC research has three stages running until July 2015,

 

firstly software development for multi-format transformation and open source code release,secondly 'case study' experiments with publishers,thirdly founding a Stiftung (non profit organisation) as an independent research group to support the project's mission after July 2015.Currently HPC has started stage 2 'case studies' as of May 1st 2014, with the publishers; Merve Verlag, McLuhan Salon, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Moos Verlag.

 

The HPC model of software is built on user research and rapid prototyping. The architectural approach is modular, back end orientated, with an emphasis on application frameworks and interoperability between services and providers, as opposed to creating stand-alone web facing applications.

 

The Hybrid Publishing Consortium is a project of the Hybrid Publishing Lab in collaboration with partners and associates. The Hybrid Publishing Lab is part of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg Innovations-Inkubator, financed by the European Regional Development Fund and co-funded by the German federal state of Lower Saxony. As an business incubator our research is conducted with industry partners and we are supported to create new startup business ventures. Currently HPC has one startup InfoMesh UG which is specialising in MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives) publishing.

 

Read more about our research plans and team here.