Mission-Aligned Partnership for Scholarly Publishing
Meru is an open source web application that connects scholarly ecosystems
Stuttgart City Library
by Zach Davis
This case study examines Cast Iron Coding's partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing initiative to develop Meru, an open-source platform that brings together scholarly content from diverse systems. The project demonstrates how mission-aligned partnerships can create technology consistent with academic values while solving practical content integration challenges.
In today's academic landscape, universities and libraries face a significant challenge: valuable scholarly content is scattered across multiple platforms and systems. A typical institution might manage journal articles through systems like OJS or Janeway, while dissertations and departmental papers reside in institutional repositories like DSpace. This fragmentation creates barriers to discovery, makes unified branding difficult, and complicates the user experience for both researchers and administrators.
The Next Generation Library Publishing Initiative
The Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) initiative emerged to address these challenges. Launched in 2019 as a collaboration between Educopia Institute, California Digital Library, and Stratos, NGLP focused on developing open-source publishing technology to empower library publishers, built around the principles of modularity, interoperability, and openness.
As noted by the NGLP Principal Investigators in their 2022 "Bundle of Sticks" article, university publishers are increasingly concerned about multinational corporations controlling scholarly research infrastructure and outputs. Academic institutions have responded by creating independent publishing tools, but these tools often operate with limited resources and narrow communities, which leaves institutions with a problematic choice: adopt values-misaligned corporate solutions with easy implementation but difficult migration paths, or use community-owned tools that struggle to compete for narrow markets.
A New Approach
The NGLP initiative, led by Katherine Skinner (Educopia), Catherine Mitchell (California Digital Library), and Kristen Ratan (Stratos), proposed an alternative path: interdependence. NGLP championed a model where separate technologies could become more robust and sustainable through voluntary collaboration and shared service approaches.
“Rather than bundling a single set of solutions to corner the market (integration) or encouraging a wealth of single-faceted initiatives that compete with one another from siloed locations (independence), a model of interdependence encourages the growth and development of distinct technologies whose strength and stability are enhanced by the voluntary partnerships and shared service models established among them.”
Skinner, K. E., Mitchell, C. & Ratan, K., (2022)“'Bundle of Sticks' and the Value of Interdependence: Building a Tools and Services Collective”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 25(1).
Meru embodies this philosophy by accepting the reality that universities manage content across multiple systems. Instead of replacing these specialized tools, Meru integrates with them, harvesting content from diverse systems, standardizing metadata, and presenting everything in a unified, user-friendly environment.
In 2020, NGLP engaged Cast Iron Coding to design and build Meru. Our team brought not just technical expertise but a proven track record in the digital humanities space and a fundamental alignment with NGLP's mission and values.
Why Cast Iron?
Throughout the Meru project, Cast Iron Coding has demonstrated our commitment to being a true partner, not just a vendor. Our mission-aligned approach, design excellence, and technical innovation have delivered a platform that meets the complex needs of library publishers while upholding the values of open, community-governed infrastructure.
For academic institutions looking to reclaim control of their scholarly communication ecosystem, Cast Iron Coding offers:
Mission alignment: We understand and share your commitment to open, values-driven scholarly communication.
Design excellence: We create beautiful, user-focused experiences that elevate your content and reinforce your brand.
Technical innovation: Our team excels at developing elegant architectural solutions to complex problems and creating systems that balance sophistication with maintainability while anticipating future needs.
Collaborative partnership: We work transparently and inclusively, engaging all stakeholders in the development process.
Cast Iron Coding is a unicorn: a highly skilled development shop with remarkable design and project management capabilities – AND a deep, values-driven commitment to supporting open and equitable scholarly communication technologies for academic communities.
Catherine MitchellNGLP Co-PI and Director of Publishing, Archives, and Digitization at the California Digital Library, University of California
Our collaborative approach was essential to the NGLP project's success. We worked closely with all stakeholders, embracing NGLP's values framework that emphasizes community governance and open standards. Cast Iron Coding brought a transparent, inclusive development process that engaged library publishers, academic institutions, and technology partners throughout the entire project lifecycle.
Elevating the User Experience
When we began designing Meru, we recognized that visual design would be a critical tool for libraries and universities to differentiate their publishing programs. Most scholarly platforms prioritized functionality over user experience, limiting institutions' ability to showcase their unique identity and content. Lacking true competition, widely used proprietary platforms have failed to keep up with modern user experience expectations, let alone innovate, which has resulted in sub-par user experiences for many readers.
We conducted a comprehensive landscape review of scholarly publishing platforms, examining their strengths and limitations. Looking beyond academic publishing to contemporary digital publications and content platforms known for excellent user experience, we developed a vision for a modern platform that could adapt to diverse institutional needs while maintaining visual sophistication.
Our design process focused on three principles:
Typographic excellence to present diverse scholarly content with both visual appeal and readability
Flexible branding to allow institutional customization while maintaining usability
Intuitive information hierarchy to create clear distinctions between navigation elements and content
The result is a platform that prioritizes discoverability, helping users easily find and navigate the content stored within Meru. We've structured the interface with a clear content hierarchy, allowing users to intuitively understand how materials are organized and related. Through simple, thoughtful design, Meru elevates scholarly work while maintaining each publishing program's unique visual identity—creating a reading experience that puts the focus on the content itself rather than the technology behind it.
A Schema-Driven Approach
Meru's technical innovation lies in its schema-driven architecture. The platform defines content through interconnected schemas that establish both the data model and the relationships between entities. For example, the journal schema defines properties like ISSN and whether the journal is peer-reviewed, while specifying that journals can contain volumes and issues.
What makes this system truly powerful is how it combines structured content with flexible presentation. While schemas define the content structure and relationships, separate XML-based templates control how that content renders on the frontend. This separation of concerns means that institutions will be able to customize their presentation layer without changing the underlying data structures.
This architecture provides several key advantages:
Extensibility: New content types can be added without requiring changes to the core platform
Consistency: The platform enforces data integrity through schema validation
Future-proofing: As scholarly communication evolves, Meru can adapt by adding new schemas
Configurable Content Harvesting
One of Meru's core strengths is its sophisticated content harvesting system. The platform primarily leverages the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a widely-adopted standard that allows digital repositories to expose their metadata in a structured format. This enables Meru to aggregate content from various repository platforms like DSpace, OJS, and Janeway.
Our upcoming release introduces an enhanced harvesting management system that significantly improves content aggregation capabilities. The system allows administrators to precisely configure where content is harvested from and where this harvested content is placed within Meru's content hierarchy. Administrators can also specify harvesting schedules and determine which system—Meru or the upstream source—should be considered the source of truth when content changes in both places. Behind the scenes, we've built abstractions that enable our development team to add new types of harvesting sources much more efficiently than before, along with declarative configuration options that specify how harvested content maps into Meru's schemas.
Meru's flexible harvesting architecture allows for sophisticated content aggregation scenarios. For example, an institutional library could map different departments' repositories into separate collections within Meru, while maintaining consistent branding and search functionality across all content.
Following two years of development to create a minimum viable product, Meru launched pilot implementations in spring 2022. These pilots provided models for three different manifestations of library publishing: "a consortial library publishing solution hosted and maintained in-house; a multi-tenant journal publishing solution hosted and supported by a third party service provider; and a hosted, turnkey, combined journal and institutional repository solution."
The NGLP team collected detailed feedback from pilot participants, which we then processed and analyzed. Through collaborative discussions with project stakeholders, we identified priority improvements and implemented targeted changes to the platform, ensuring Meru evolved to better meet the real-world needs of library publishers.
Zach and his team have been instrumental in translating our goals into a robust and compelling platform (Meru) that combines the best of user experience design with a schema-based technical model that supports institutions in aggregating their publishing and repository materials regardless of the distinct platforms they run on the back end. We couldn’t be happier with the partnership!
Catherine MitchellNGLP Co-PI and Director of Publishing, Archives, and Digitization at the California Digital Library, University of California
The success of these pilots led to additional funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the University of North Carolina Press, and the Big Ten Academic Alliance in late 2023. This second phase focuses on developing Meru into a production-ready, open-source display layer to rival proprietary library publishing solutions, as well as creating tools and workflows that will enable more library publishers to adopt the platform.
As we conclude the current development phase, we're preparing to offer managed, hosted instances of Meru for institutions that want to try the platform without managing the technical infrastructure themselves. We've built a sophisticated deployment architecture on the Digital Ocean app platform that includes a managed database, object storage, a Keycloak authentication instance, and various Meru services running in Docker containers. This infrastructure allows us to rapidly deploy and reliably maintain independent Meru instances for universities and publishing organizations.
Our hosted service will provide a competitively priced, turnkey solution that includes initial setup, harvesting configuration, comprehensive training, and onboarding support. We'll also assist with migrating existing content from legacy platforms into Meru. Subscribers will benefit from ongoing technical support and regular updates, with subscription fees directly supporting the continued development and improvement of the platform. Through this service model, we aim to make Meru a sustainable, open standard and community-governed alternative to commercial publishing platforms while ensuring its features and capabilities continue to evolve with the needs of library publishers.
If you're interested in this service, please get in touch and let us know. We'd love to give you a demo of what Meru is capable of and have a conversation about whether it's the right solution for you.
