Advancing Hyku is a collaborative project to support the growth of open access through institutional repositories, by introducing significant structural improvements and new features to the Samvera Community’s Hyku platform. The project partners are University of Virginia Library, Ubiquity Press and the British Library, with funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of philanthropists Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The project runs October 2019-February 2022, with the final grant report due by April 16, 2022.

The project will design and implement specific advances to the open-source community repository product Hyku. These will drive green open access and will increase value to researchers with a combined approach of auto-population and expanding the array of integrated, open source services, making the repository a more attractive dissemination option.

In order to achieve this the project will work to scale the repositories automatically by integrating open-resource discovery tools (e.g. Unpaywall and Open Access Button), connect to author identification and profile services (e.g. ORCID), and establish pathways to long-term preservation services. We will draw upon Ubiquity’s publishing experience to treat articles, books, and newer forms of scholarship in repositories as first-class objects and focus on authors to incentivize their participation. We will assess the Hyku architecture so as to inform the integration of the system with institutional systems as a way of driving greater value to researchers and institutional administrations.

The primary institutional partners in the project are the University of Virginia Library and the British Library, both of whom are members of the Samvera community who have received services from Ubiquity Press, which in turn will perform most of the technical development in close coordination with these community partners.

The partners will work together over the grant period to assess requirements and jointly create detailed, component-specific development plans, resulting in new capabilities collaboratively developed by Ubiquity and the two institutions. All code will be released as open source and wherever possible will be merged with the Hyku core codebase in accord with the Samvera Community’s practices.