The Web, the W3C and the Future of Publishing

As custodians of the World Wide Web, the Web Consortium (W3C) is both a leader and a follower. We follow because you can't standardise a process or technology until it is in use. We lead, because we guide the new technologies from technical, business, and social perspectives. The Web has already changed publishing, and we are at the brink of even bigger changes. What happens when Web technologies are good enough to replace existing authoring tools? What happens when the Web includes SVG and MathML and can support typography powerful enough to produce printed books? What happens when electronic books and Web sites converge? We're not quite there yet, but W3C is working in this area, working with commercial publishers, with IPDF and other organizations, listening to industry experts and tool-makers, and gently nudging the Web forward all over the world. The difficulty facing publishers today is how to manage when the Web isn't quite ready. The right question to ask is, how do we make the Web ready? In this session, Liam Quin from the W3C will describe what W3C is doing in its new Publishing Activity, how it will affect you, and how you can get involved.

Inconsistent XML as a barrier to reuse of Open Access Content

In this paper, we will describe the current state of some of the tagging of articles within the PMC Open Access subset. As a case study, we will use our experiences developing the Open Access Media Importer, a tool to harvest content from the OA subset for automated upload to Wikimedia Commons. Tagging inconsistencies stretch across several aspects of the articles, ranging from licensing to keywords to the media types of supplementary materials. While all of these complicate large-scale reuse, the unclear licensing statements had the greatest impact, requiring us to implement text mining-like algorithms in order to accurately determine whether or not specific content was compatible with reuse on Wikimedia Commons. Besides presenting examples of incorrectly tagged XML from a range of publishers, we will also explore past and current efforts towards standardization of license tagging, and we will describe a set of recommendations related to tagging practices of certain data, to ensure that it is both compatible with existing standards, and consistent and machine-readable.

Extending BITS with an orthogonal layer for conveying layout information using CSSa

Deploying advanced XML technologies such as XProc, XSLT 2.0, and Schematron, an "ex-post" conversion of InDesign files may be a viable alternative to XML-first publishing production workflows.

The Challenges and Benefits of Automating NLM-to-ePub3 File Conversion

While converting NLM book tag XML to an ePub seems like a relatively straightforward process (hey, an ePub is mostly just HTML, right?), setting up a workflow to do just that is quite challenging. It turns out writing the XSLT could be considered the "easy" part. Other problems, such as dealing with ePub display issues across ebook readers (anything from minor CSS differences to major MathML display problems), deciding what tagging makes the most sense semantically, and figuring out how to give semantic meaning to visual formatting such as table cell shading add a layer of complexity to the process. This paper discusses the challenges, rewards, and as-yet unresolved problems encountered in the process of creating an NLM to ePub3 workflow.

Seeking Suggestions for Future JATS-Con Events

This Impromptu JATS Users Group meeting is helping to fill the gap created by the shutdown of the US Government. However, it is not a replacement for JATS-Con. The attendees will discuss possible futures for JATS-Con.

mPach: Integrated Publishing and Archiving of Journals in HathiTrust

mPach is a package of tools being developed to provide a modular platform to enable the publication of born-digital open-access journals in HathiTrust, a digital library created by a partnership of major research institutions. One of the chief technological challenges in creating such a toolkit is enabling the conversion of edited manuscripts to JATS, which was chosen as the preservation-quality format. This paper provides a technical overview of the mPach platform, with special attention paid to the design and functionality of Norm, a tool being developed to convert Microsoft Word documents to JATS.

Ontology based Biomedical Research Paper Authoring Support Tool

Biomedical research papers typically formatted as IMRAD structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Even though following this format, writing a paper in English is challenging for authors, because the most difficult thing is to organize and present their ideas with appropriate expressions. Our goal is to develop a paper authoring support system that helps biomedical scientists to organize their ideas for a specific discourse purpose. As an initial step toward the goal, this study developed an abstract authoring support tool that provides candidate lexical bundles organized according to IMRAD structure. Lexical bundles function as basic building blocks of this discourse structure. For example, the lexical bundle "the purpose of this study was" indicates the research purpose in the Introduction section. Lexical bundles were extracted from sentences in 152,083 structured abstracts of the PubMed Central Open Access Subset and analyzed their distribution by IMRAD sections. To organize lexical bundles according to IMRAD, the Lexical Bundle Ontology was built. Then, a JATS-compliant authoring support tool was implemented. This tool lists up candidate lexical bundles responding to authors' discourse purposes in a specific section and thereby helps to complete sentences. We present a use case scenario of this authoring support tool. We expect that this tool be a useful, at least in biomedical abstract writing, to organize author's ideas to achieve specific discourse purpose. This tool is target to primarily for biomedical scientists whose mother tongue is not English. However, native speakers may still find the utility.

JATS and NISO — the value of community standardization

Since its earliest days, the publishing structures that became the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) standards have proven themselves valuable as a method for exchanging journal content. Designed by a team with decades of typesetting and markup expertise, the specifications were quickly adopted by preservation communities and as a basis for many of the largest publishers production processes. As digital publishing evolves, the importance of common vocabulary structures like JATS will only increase, because exchanging digital files is a critical component in a functioning digital content ecosystem. NISO plays a critical role in bringing together content creators, intermediaries, and consumers to develop interoperability standards for the creation, discovery, distribution and preservation of content. With the support and engagement of the National Library of Medicine, NISO has engaged a broader community of participants to the standardization of JATS and it continues to support its ongoing development and expansion of the standard. During this brief talk, Todd will discuss the value of national standardization of JATS, and the future of interoperable content standards in digital publishing.