PeerLibrary is funded primarily by its contributors. Currently, the main assets of the project are code and documentation, which are produced by unpaid students. We have not received any financial donations.
However, some organizations are helping us with necessary building blocks. So far, we have received support from:
- The EECS Department at UC Berkeley, which provided servers;
- The Internet Archive, which offered help with storage and scanning infrastructure;
- CrossRef, which is helping us with entity resolution and digital object identifiers;
- Mendeley, which is helping us with metadata.
In addition, we are working together with many other open source projects. For example:
- We went through a lot of issues with Meteor, the reactive web framework we are using. There are around twenty tickets opened on their repository because of PeerLibrary. Fortunately, their team is quite helpful and often holds co-working meetups in San Francisco;
- We are using Hypothes.is to handle selection anchoring. We are also trying to federate our annotations. The Hypothes.is folks are extremely helpful (see this and this);
I see the role of PeerLibrary as an application that integrates many different efforts (the open access movement, Internet Archive, Mozilla PDF.js, Hypothes.is, Meteor, eLife Lens, CrossRef...) to achieve a new ideal in scholarly communication: collaborative reading. Our role is to bring collaborative reading to life.
So we are putting the pieces together. (and of course, contributing upstream...)