The Online Publication Service of the University of Chicago

The Online Publication Service of the University of Chicago

Publishing peer-reviewed digital series and providing a reliable, institutionally supported, and editorially regulated venue for preserving and disseminating digital data and creative digital works, with full control by authors of how their data is organized and which data is made public on the Web.

Digital Publications

Publishing born-digital volumes that integrate narrative text and datasets. Publishing digital companions to supplement traditional print publications.

Background

The OPS is located at the University of Chicago and is supported by managing editors, developers, data scientists, digital librarians, and domain-area digital specialists.

Technology

OPS publications are available for free. Datasets are also available for download and analysis. All publications share a common digital framework in the OCHRE database.

Forum for Digital Culture

The Forum for Digital Culture

The Online Publication Service is situated in the Forum for Digital Culture at the University of Chicago. The Forum is the center and meeting place for digital arts and humanities at the University of Chicago. The Forum for Digital Culture supports projects in every branch of the arts and humanities through all phases of the project, from the initial acquisition of the project’s data through the stages of managing, analyzing, and publishing the data and then archiving it in a standards-compliant fashion so it is preserved long into the future.

OCHRE tree with name

The Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment

The OPS takes a database approach to digital publishing. All data is modeled and managed in the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment (OCHRE). The OCHRE platform is a tightly integrated suite of computational tools for working with all kinds of data through all stages of research, from initial acquisition to final archiving of the data. OCHRE provides a seamless environment in which it is easy to move from one stage of research to the next.

UChicago Logo

The OPS at the University of Chicago

The Online Publication Service is supported by experienced computational and domain-area professionals at the University of Chicago. OPS staff hold advanced degrees in the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. The OPS is committed to providing a reliable, institutionally supported, and editorially regulated venue for preserving and disseminating digital publications and creative digital works.

The OPS partners with the University of Chicago Library. The Library is committed to providing citability, discoverability, and durability to OPS publications. OPS publications are archived in and discoverable through the Library’s digital repository. Because data in OPS publications is curated in OCHRE's highly atomized semi-structured graph database system, publications can be cited at a highly granular level. In addition to a stable identifier to refer to the entire work, individual sections, graphs, tables, and other data elements can be cited with unique and stable identifiers.

The OPS partners with the University of Chicago Press. Authors may choose to publish their work in print through the Press and to work with the OPS to publish a digital companion to their print work.