From the PLOS Tech Blog:
Several years ago, we forecast a need to enhance and implement sophisticated content management systems for optimum handling of web and article content, as well as to innovate architectural advances to the journal website software. In 2013, we completed a landscape study to determine the available options for addressing the concerns with our current application suite and as a result, began the challenging effort of building our own submission, editorial and peer review system. We also made a decision to modernize Ambra into a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) application to enable us to more rapidly deliver new features to our readers.
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The best way to demonstrate the benefits of our new system 0 is to showcase it on our own journals and communities first. Ultimately PLOS is committed to share what we have developed with the scientific publishing community and to work with others to enable Open Access and Open Science to flourish. PLOS’ Article-Level Metrics made available to the community under an Open Source MIT license–and now called Lagotto–have since been adopted by CrossRef. After launching on several journals to ensure scalability, the code base for the submission system will be made available via an open source MIT license so others can benefit from our efforts. We continue to seek interested parties to join our development efforts so that we can learn how to best govern the code in a fully open source environment.
To honor our roots in the Open Access movement while harnessing technology to propel scientific communication into the Open Science era, we chose the name Aperta™ for our new submission system. Aperta means Open in Italian and brings with it the association of forthcoming and fairness, qualities that PLOS strives to bring to the process of publishing scientific research.
Much More About Aperta in the Complete Blog Post
Even More Here: Placing Authors at the Center of the Scientific Endeavor (via PLOS Blog)
About Gary Price
