OpenScholar is an open source SaaS platform built as a Drupal distribution. It’s a web site builder application that allows end users to easily create dynamic and customizable web sites on the fly. Each site comes with a suite of apps, widgets and themes users can choose from, enabling them to build and manage feature-rich web sites.

We turn a single Drupal install into an multi-tenant architecture where a single install of the software hosts multiples (virtual) web sites. This unique architecture allows (academic) institutions to provide SaaS service that scales at very low cost and have control on the consistent branding across sites. Aggregated content across the sites allows for out of the box institutional repositories and institutional-wide searching.

OpenScholar is one of the first Drupal distribution and started as a personal site builder for academics. It’s already been used successfully for this purpose in many universities around the world including Harvard , Princeton, Berkeley, Universidad Nova de Lisboa, Alfaisal University and more. In the last year, as part of the Harvard Web Publishing Initiative we have upgraded OpenScholar to Drupal 7 and at the same time extended its capabilities to be used as a site builder for different types of web sites including academic and administrative department sites. The new version is more flexible allowing different types of sites to coexist and integrate with each other. For example one installation could host one or more academic departments each having subsites of different types (personal, projects etc.). This makes OpenScholar a great solution for institutions of different sizes and types, from single departments to schools and universities.

In this session we will talk about OpenScholar as a unique Drupal distribution, it’s building blocks, how we use it at Harvard and how you can use it as a SaaS platform for your institution.