What is Yāna?

The goal of the Yāna project is to provide a light-weight, modular,
open source template within which open access publishers can develop
their own mobile applications.

About the Project

Yāna will provide a free, open-source template that open access
journals can use as the basis of their own multi-platform mobile
applications. The Yāna template will provide the functionality
required by any journal operating on a mobile platform. These include:

Easy navigation 
Online viewing of journal content
Bookmarking of favorite articles (in second Alpha release)
Information about the journal 

The template will also take advantage of standards-based web
technologies to allow publishers to deploy their applications to
multiple platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.). We believe
that a well-documented and publicly available template will greatly
reduce the cost to each journal publisher of developing a custom
mobile application.

Why Yāna?

In the current environment, open access journals have access to mobile
apps—but at a significant, perhaps even a prohibitive, cost.

Each open access journal publisher must develop its own application or
pay a third party to develop the app using a proprietary framework.

Yāna will provide a basic template for multi-platform mobile journal
applications, but with a big difference: the code for Yāna will be
open source and made available to everyone along with extensive
documentation about how to customize it. Journal publishers will be
able to "see under the hood," something prohibited by companies
seeking to profit from their proprietary templates.

Go Multi-Platform

Yāna will provide a template from which open access journal publishers
can develop their own applications. With the basic functionality
already available, OA publishers can focus on customization, greatly
reducing their development costs.

Because Yāna will be compatible with multiple platforms, there's no
need to start from scratch to build an application for Apple's iPhone,
for example, and another for Google's Android.

For more information see:

http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/yana/