eLife Joins Substance Consortium to Support Development of Open-Source Online Content-Editing Tools

By joining the consortium, eLife will support the introduction of innovative new tools to help expand the current online open scholarly infrastructure.

eLife is pleased to announce that we have joined a consortium of organisations committed to supporting Substance, a JavaScript library of tools for web-based content editing.

As an open-source project first started in 2010, Substance provides the building blocks for realising custom text editors and web-based publishing systems that are critical in establishing an open-source ecosystem for knowledge creation and dissemination. The developers behind Substance – Michael Aufreiter and Oliver Buchtala – were key to the 2013 release of the eLife Lens Reader. They have also helped to introduce Texture, a toolset for the production of scientific content, Stencila, an open office suite for reproducible research and Archivist, a platform for publishing interactive historical documents. In 2016, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CoKo), SciELO and Érudit formed a consortium committed to the integration and sustainability of the Substance tools.

“By supporting innovative open-source solutions that help commoditise the infrastructure for research communication, eLife aims to help publishers and researchers avoid duplicating efforts across the sector and focus instead on accelerating the pace of discovery,” says Giuliano Maciocci, eLife’s Head of Product.

“As a member of the Substance Consortium, we look forward to supporting the creation of valuable new tools and influencing current practices in the authoring, editing and production workflows for document-centred publishing.”

“eLife has been an early supporter of Substance and we are pleased to now count them as a member of the Substance Consortium,” adds Michael Aufreiter. “With eLife’s commitment, we look forward to an even more ambitious roadmap for the introduction of innovative new tools to help expand the current online open scholarly infrastructure.”

The Substance Consortium invites other organisations to join. For more information, please visit: http://substance.io/consortium.

For further details about Texture, please see eLife Labs.

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