Pressing Forward in Scholarly Communities: Synthesizing Communication Technologies with the Researchers Who Utilize Them

Digital communication technologies have dramatically changed the ways in which scholarship is accessed, discussed, and shared. Joining the traditional journals and manuscripts are new ways to distribute and consume research, including blogs, podcasts, white papers, and more. There is more information available and more ways to access it than ever before, which presents new sets of challenges and opportunities. PressForward is free, open-source software that responds to these needs by combining the features of content aggregation, discussion, and publication into a single, user-friendly dashboard. Acknowledging that collaboration and networking is increasingly important in research development and funding, PressForward has built-in, flexible user roles and workflows that allow communities of any scale to contribute in multiple ways. This article will review the history and features of PressForward, as well as describe the community partnerships that both utilize the software and influence the progress of the project. Introduction The 21st century is an exciting time to be part of a research endeavor. Information moves at the speed of light, scholarship is being produced at rates far greater than ever before, and networking with peers has become one of the most important elements of scholarly communication.1,2 The “Age of Information” is a time of wonders, but all of these monumental strides introduce new questions and tensions between tradition and innovation. Whether he or she likes it or not, every scholar participates in ongoing conversations in at least two separate arenas: their own discipline as well as scholarly communication processes generally. Reading and publishing the research in one’s field is a form of participation. The venues and methods that all researchers choose for those exchanges shapes the nature of the scholarly communication landscape with which they engage. These are the reasons that motivated the development of PressForward, a software solution for the discovery and sharing of scholarship online. While the volume and breadth of information available online continues to explode, scholarly communities seek ways to efficiently facilitate content filtering, contextualization, and conversation. PressForward is an open-source plugin for the WordPress content management system that responds to these needs by combining the features of content aggregation, discussion, collaboration, and publication into a single, userfriendly dashboard. The creation of the software and its features are irrevocably tied to a perpetual iteration of research and collaboration. Developing a scholarly communications platform requires a thorough understanding of not only the technology upon which it is built, but also of the manners of the communities that will benefit from its application. As one of the primary objectives of the project, the PressForward team of digital scholarship experts and open access advocates have Olson: Pressing Forward in Scholarly Communities Collaborative Librarianship 9(1): 30-38 (2017) 31 committed to an ongoing relationship within the scholarly communications ecosystem.