Feedback on your usage model

pablofe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:03:00 GMT

Participation in the Beta program so far has been fantastic and we have been able to incorporate most of the feedback and requests that you have sent in so far. It is evident that this community is very hands-on and enthusiastic about the authoring and archiving process.

We have been able to engage in a good dialog with several community members, with folks submitting their sample documents for testing and scenarios as input. While a lot of people have downloaded the add-in, not everyone has contacted us with comments and feedback yet, so I wanted to open up the dialog and solicit your input.

As expected, the majority of the early adopters are part of the staff at journals, repositories, libraries, and also companies that support the publishing workflow. There are a few enthusiasts/early adopters, as well as folks interested in the writing process and on capturing semantics, who have also tried out the add-in and sent their feedback. Many thanks to all that have contacted us!

To help kickstart the broader dialog, here are some questions as to how you are using, or planning to use, the add-in as part of your workflow:

Do you start using the add-in by importing an xml file, or by pasting in content from another document?
Do you use the add-in for editing content, metadata, or both?
Do you introduce new sections into documents? Do you tend to use custom sections?
Have you created templates, with sections that you use often, for re-use?
Have you used the keyword or subject area panel (on the right side of the window)?
Are there elements in the NLM format which are not currently supported in the add-in which are essential for your workflow?
Do you plan to access the content or metadata in the file directly, without using Word (for example using your own internal tools)?

If there is anything else you want to comment on in relation to the add-in, feel free to send it in. You can post your answers as comments on the blog or send them over email. This is a great opportunity to engage in the development of the add-in and help shape the experience for authoring scientific and technical articles.

And, once more, many thanks for your participation and input.

Beta of Microsoft’s Article Authoring Add-in Now Available Broadly for Download

pablofe — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:34:00 GMT

Enabling Journals to Better Connect with Scientific Authors in a Digital World

REDMOND, Wash. — May 30, 2008 — At the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston, Microsoft announced the wide availability of the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007. In addition to enabling Word users to open and save documents using the National Library of Medicine’s XML Journal Publishing format, used for the authoring of scientific articles, the Beta 1 release adds support for the NCBI Book format, used for authoring book chapters for digital books.

Enabling Journals to Better Connect with Authors in a Digital World

A key value of the Article Authoring add-in is in enabling editors at scientific and technical journals to create article templates, tailored for their individual journals’ requirements. These templates will assist authors in writing articles with greater consistency in relation to the structure of the articles, better reflecting the content requirements of the journals, and in expressing semantic information which is key for the search and consumption of articles in digital form.

“The Add-In is a very positive development that will help scholars to write and tag their articles in the industry-standard NLM XML DTD, and will help publishers to process these articles in their editorial and production departments. We are pleased to be working with Microsoft on testing and refining this important tool that will benefit scholars and scholarly publishers alike”, said Ahmed Hindawi, CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation.

Preserving Information for Archiving and Search

The Article Authoring add-in enables authors to express a greater variety of semantic information, and metadata, as part of writing articles. This semantic information, captured in the XML format and preserved based on the extensibility in the Open XML standard, will prove valuable in improving the results from search queries and for the long term archival of scientific information.

In addition to preserving information that is native to Microsoft Word, the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring add-in also preserves Math information from controls, such as Design Science’s MathType, when saving Word documents to the NLM XML format. Paul Topping, President and CEO of Design Science, Inc., stated that "We were happy to work with Microsoft to add support for Equation Editor and MathType equations to the Article Authoring add-in. Since at least 85% of the articles containing math submitted to scientific journals have equations in those formats, this support is critical."

The Open XML standard, with its capabilities to support custom-schemas, enables the Word add-in to support the entire set of rich information encoded by the NLM format. The add-in also provides easy access to the metadata in the NLM format, both by journal editors and by authors, directly from within the Word user interface. The broad availability of the Beta 1 release provides a way for the different communities, such as authors, journals, digital archives, and software vendors, to evaluate the technology and provide feedback, guiding further development of the add-in towards its initial release in the second half of 2008.

Information on how to download the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09c55527-0759-4d6d-ae02-51e90131997e&displaylang=en.

ex Scientia : Beta 1

Feedback on your usage model

Beta of Microsoft’s Article Authoring Add-in Now Available Broadly for Download