eLife Pathways is now stewarding Kotahi
eLife Pathways is now stewarding Kotahi, the open-source publishing platform designed to support innovative publishing workflows, from submission to publication.
One of the first major steps for eLife Pathways is taking on the official stewardship of Kotahi from the Coko Foundation. Following the Coko Foundation’s sunset at the start of this year, eLife Pathways stepped forward after learning that the foundation was seeking a new steward for the platform. Our history and shared mission made this transition a completely natural fit.
Kotahi’s journey
Kotahi’s origin began at Coko, which laid the groundwork with PubSweet, which later evolved into CokoServer. Coko was later joined by a collaborative team from eLife, Hindawi, and Europe PMC to establish community governance and shared development goals, leading to the official launch of Kotahi in 2021. Since then, Kotahi has become a flexible, highly customisable platform for preprint servers, preprint review, journals, and micropublications. The open-source technology centres on single-source publishing and supports adaptable, end-to-end workflows. This approach drastically reduces time and cost inefficiencies while accelerating content delivery.
Today, Kotahi supports the review-and-assessment publication component of eLife’s Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) workflow and a variety of research groups that rely on the platform to share and curate knowledge. These include MetaRoR, Lifecycle Journal, and NASA’s Astromaterials Data System (Astromat). Through its flexibility, Kotahi has proven its versatility, with different communities successfully customising individual instances to meet their scholarly publishing needs.
Why is eLife Pathways the right steward?
We have collaborated closely with Coko on Kotahi’s development since its inception. Because we are familiar with its codebase and have already worked with many of the academic groups currently using the software, we managed a smooth transition while maintaining full operational stability for the existing user base. We see Kotahi as a cornerstone of our long-term strategy. Bringing it under the eLife Pathways umbrella enables us to:
- Empower a community-driven roadmap: We can engage the existing, vibrant Kotahi community to develop a roadmap that lets the partners and groups who use Kotahi shape where the technology goes next.
- Drive intentional development: We can now steer the development of Kotahi with a direct focus on ecosystem-wide utility, ensuring the software remains robust, modern, and accessible.
- Deepen ecosystem interoperability: Direct stewardship allows us to seamlessly connect Kotahi with other major open infrastructures (including eLife’s preprint review infrastructure and Sciety and provide tooling and features that other systems will benefit from.
What’s the current situation?
Since taking on responsibility for the Kotahi infrastructure at the start of the year, we have focused on migrating the platform into the eLife Pathways ecosystem. Our technical team is currently hard at work improving the architecture’s robustness and stability. At the same time, we are collaborating with the active Kotahi community to co-create a roadmap for the year ahead.
We are also starting to open the door to expansion. Our team is actively speaking with new research groups eager to adopt the infrastructure, while simultaneously pursuing integration opportunities with other open-source infrastructure providers to see how we can interoperate and build a more connected scholarly network. A recent example is Kotahi’s role in the recently announced Open Science NL-funded project: Next-generation publishing, advancing the Publish-Review-Curate model, where eLife Pathways will work alongside researchers, institutes and technologists to create interoperable publishing technology.
Our vision for Kotahi
Kotahi serves as a foundational piece of open infrastructure that advances the open science ecosystem. The platform offers key features for sharing, reviewing, and curating research, which communities can use individually or in combination. We also see Kotahi as a foundation for innovative technology that will move us beyond traditional publishing. We see a future in which AI is incorporated into Kotahi, playing an important role in connecting research outputs and supporting modular, machine-readable science. By bringing these tools to the wider community, we will help other organisations integrate Kotahi into their existing systems, experiment with new models, and drive independent scholarly communication.
To realise this opportunity, we are streamlining Kotahi’s system to make adoption seamless for the community. Direct community feedback guides our roadmap as we develop integrations with other open scholarly publishing infrastructures to simplify tasks like data migration and workflow orchestration.
To learn more about Kotahi and our plans, get in touch at technology@elifesciences.org.