Kotahi Foundation

The Kotahi Foundation’s journey began in 2015 with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation, setting out on a mission to build open infrastructure for scholarly communications.

A tight-knit team was formed, bringing together innovators from eLife, Hindawi, Coko, and EMBL-EBI (Europe PMC). This group of early pioneers shared a common goal: to modernise publishing infrastructure.

The first set of innovations focused on PubSweet, a shared, flexible and customizable infrastructure for building open source publishing platforms.

This pioneering work led to several successful products that are still in use today, including Phenom (now owned by Wiley), EPMC Plus, and Caltech’s Micropublication.org. It also powered eLife’s manuscript submission system and Coko’s xpub that are no longer in production.

The next phase saw eLife and Coko’s work evolve into a new infrastructure called CokoServer (replacing PubSweet), an open source framework for building state-of-the-art publishing platforms .

This marked the true beginning of Kotahi’s development as it was built on-top of CokoServer.

Over the past three years, Kotahi’s efforts have expanded through new collaborations with partners like Amnet and various researcher groups. These collaborations have helped refine Kotahi and shape its vision.

Initial production deployments began for a wide range of co-designed publishing use cases including eLife’s Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) publishing model, SciJournal, and Biophysics Colab.

Seeing the utility of Kotahi, a diverse set of groups have gravitated towards the platform to meet their specific needs for sharing research. Kotahi has a range of new scholar-led publishing use cases including:

• MetaRoR, a new PRC platform for review and scholarly communication in metascience.

• iPlaces, a location based, field station journal for sharing projects, permits, and data.

• Bat Spillover Evidence Compendium, a community rapidly curating and reviewing newly emerging scientific data and evidence.

• Astromat – the Astromaterials Data System (Astromat) is the primary NASA-sponsored archive for laboratory analyses of returned samples from planetary missions as well as meteorites. Astromat provides services for the curation, publication, long-term preservation, and access of mission and research data in alignment with the FAIR Principles.”

A new foundation (legal entity) is incorporated. Jan 6, 2025.

Kotahi’s vision is to revolutionise the scholarly publishing ecosystem and act as a catalyst for innovation, collaboration and knowledge dissemination. Kotahi aspires to a future where the global research community has unrestricted access to cutting-edge tools and services for the rapid and open-sharing of their work.