Hypothes.is and PKP Announce Strategic Relationship

PKP is pleased to announce its support for the Hypothes.is initiative to bring a  pervasive implementation of web-based annotation support across scholarship, based on open technologies and an open web protocol. They have invited a wide range of participants from the scholarly publishing sector to support their initiative and this is a very natural commitment for PKP. Both Hypothes.is and PKP are successful open source projects that serve the community of academics and researchers, and share many of the same ideals — developing software and services that are free, open, non-profit and neutral.

In support of this relationship, PKP released a Hypothes.is plugin for OJS 2.4.x in September, 2015. Both parties will encourage collaboration amongst their respective networks, partners and user communities to use “open” tools and technologies.

Dan Whaley, Hypothes.is CEO said

“Open Journal Systems is the principal open source publishing platform for the scholarly community. They also understand the benefits that a web annotation layer can bring to scholarship and why it’s important that it be open, standards-based and independent of the content layer. We’re thrilled to partner with them to ensure that a high quality annotation experience is possible for the journals that rely on their platform.”

Alec Smecher, PKP’s Technical Architect and the developer responsible for the Hypothes.is plug available for OJS stated: “Hypothes.is has been getting a lot of attention of late as a popular way to add scholar-friendly discussion and annotation tools to web-based content. We hope that someday soon we’ll also be able to apply it not just to published content but also as a workflow tool — its manuscript-centric approach makes it an attractive option for peer review.” Current users of OJS can integrate Hypothes.is as a commenting and annotation tool for published content by installing the OJS plugin, available at https://github.com/asmecher/hypothesis.

About Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is a non-profit organization started in 2011 and based in San Francisco, California that is developing open source software to support annotation of web pages.  More information on their development activities and their vision to achieve the wide-spread use of annotation tools in the next five years can be found at https://hypothes.is

About PKP

The Public Knowledge Project was established in 1998 at the University of British Columbia. Since that time PKP has expanded and evolved into an international and virtual operation with two institutional anchors at Stanford University and Simon Fraser University Library. OJS is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale. More information about PKP and its software and services is available at http://pkp.sfu.ca.