Building the Kotahi Foundation: A Vision for Open Scholarly Infrastructure

For the last four years, Coko has incubated Kotahi, an open infrastructure platform for scholarly communication. Building a system like Kotahi is both expensive and complex, which is why most publishers either rent existing systems or build their own tailored solutions. Our goal with Kotahi is to offer a third, compelling alternative: a fully open-source platform that delivers unparalleled value and flexibility.

To sustain the development of Kotahi, we’ve worked on numerous projects for organizations like Caltech, NCBI, DataCite, HHMI, and others. Surplus from these efforts has been reinvested into Kotahi’s development. As a result, Kotahi has evolved into a sophisticated platform with a microservices architecture, client-server separation, and deployment pipelines for staging and production. Our development process is streamlined with professional project management, quality assurance, and transparent tracking of milestones through GitLab. Additionally, a number of research groups and publishers are commissioning work on Kotahi, fueling further collaboration and innovation.

An important aspect of our work has been our close collaboration with research groups. Unlike traditional publishers, researchers are recognizing the need for Kotahi’s collaborative content production features. Kotahi isn’t just a publishing platform; it’s a tool for the entire research lifecycle—authoring, submission management, peer review, and content registration with the scholarly record.

From this perspective, Kotahi is much more than a publishing platform. It supports every stage of knowledge production—creation, review, improvement, and sharing—and can be adapted to handle a wide variety of research outputs, from manuscripts and preprints to data publications, open reviews and more.

Our mission with Kotahi is to bridge gaps in the research workflow, providing an adaptable, robust platform that researchers and publishers alike can leverage for their unique needs. As we take the next step in building the Kotahi Foundation, we are laying the groundwork for a future where open, collaborative infrastructure is the standard for scholarly communication.

The platform has matured technically, and we've built the essential foundations. Now it’s time to create the organizational structure that will take Kotahi to the next level—the Kotahi Foundation. This new foundation is a pivotal step in ensuring that Kotahi remains a powerful, open-source option for the scholarly communication ecosystem. If you’d like a sneak peek at where we’re headed, visit: https://kotahi.foundation.

We’re inviting early adopters who are passionate about making a difference to join us in shaping this future. Whether you can contribute development ideas, financial resources, or other forms of collaboration, your involvement at this stage will have a significant impact. If you believe in expanding the diversity of options in this sector and want to support a platform that empowers both established publishers and emerging, researcher-driven workflows, I encourage you to reach out to me at adam@coko.foundation.