Project Charter
Purpose
The Open Manuscript Initiative (OMI) is an open-source project dedicated to creating an interoperable, semantic, and platform-independent ecosystem for scholarly writing, peer review, publishing, and long-term preservation.
The project aims to replace format-centric authoring workflows with a semantic manuscript model that separates scholarly meaning from visual presentation.
Vision
OMI envisions a future where scholarly manuscripts are created once, enriched throughout their lifecycle, and published everywhere without manual reformatting.
Researchers should focus on knowledge rather than document formatting.
Mission
The mission of OMI is to develop open standards, open specifications, and open software that enable portable scholarly manuscripts across journals, publishers, repositories, and research infrastructures.
Core Principles
The project is guided by the following principles:
- Open by default
- Platform independent
- Semantic first
- Human-readable
- Machine-processable
- Interoperable
- Extensible
- Accessible
- Long-term sustainable
Objectives
The initial objectives include:
- Develop a semantic manuscript model.
- Design a modular authoring platform.
- Support collaborative peer review.
- Enable flexible publishing workflows.
- Generate multiple publication formats from a single source.
- Integrate with existing scholarly infrastructures.
Scope
OMI focuses on:
- scholarly authoring
- semantic document structure
- annotations
- citations
- peer review
- editorial workflows
- publishing
- preservation
- interoperability
OMI does not seek to replace publishers or journal management systems, but to integrate with them.
Governance
The project follows an open governance model.
Technical decisions are documented publicly.
Community participation is encouraged.
See:
- Governance
- Contributing
- Code of Conduct
Licensing
Unless stated otherwise, source code is released under the MIT License.
Documentation may use Creative Commons licensing where appropriate.
Community
OMI welcomes contributions from:
- researchers
- software developers
- publishers
- librarians
- editors
- designers
- students
Long-Term Goals
The long-term vision includes:
- international community
- open specifications
- reference implementation
- plugin ecosystem
- broad institutional adoption
- sustainable governance
Status
Current status:
Pre-alpha
This document will evolve together with the project.