ex Scientia : Microsoft eJournal Service

Peer Review in the Age of Software as a Service

pablofe — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:55:00 GMT

The Microsoft eJournal Service is a good example of a growing trend towards delivering functionality through the Software as a Service approach.

This web based service enables scientists and researchers to more easily engage in the collaborative process that is the foundation of Scholarly Publishing. The service aims at lowering the technical and financial barriers involved in getting a publication up and running, by removing the need for purchasing and maintaining servers, as well as installing and updating software packages. While some aspects of publishing remain the same, such as producing good research, capturing the results in an article, finding experts to review the article, and polishing the article for publishing, the goal is that the service will make the publishing process more accessible and available to a larger number of scientists.

Roles and Workflows

The service is based on three key roles: Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. Through the service, Editors can gather and review submissions from Authors, and coordinate the review process with the Reviewers. At the end of the review process, approved articles can be posted to the journal site and/or submitted to repositories, or even passed to other services.

Underlying the service is a set of workflows, which guide the different participants through the process and help manage the tasks and deadlines. These workflows support the core interactions which underlie the review process, with some options available to configure the workflow.

Format Independence and Browser Neutrality

The service does not impose the use of a particular file format, the Editor can restrict submissions to only certain file types if desired, and should be accessible through any web browser. In selecting a file format, I would advise migrating to XML based formats, such as OpenXML, which can more easily capture semantics, metadata, and relationship between content and data, and are more conducive to computer processing for search and semantic analysis.

Repositories

At the end of the process, the Editor can configure the service to deposit the articles to different repositories. One of those repositories is ArXiv, which is very popular for Physics and Math content, and can now be accessed using the SWORD protocol.

The service can also be used to deposit to other SWORD based archives. This functionality would also be useful for depositing into institutional repositories, and as such, the service could be used to manage the review process for publications such as thesis.

In order to deposit to a repository, you will need a login name and password on the system. The repository may have requirements as to the file formats supported, and their packaging, which you will need to match before submitting.

For folks in BioMed, you can also select to deposit into PubMed Central, and, as noted before, you need to be approved for deposit ahead of time, and have access to the system.

Participate!

As with the Authoring Add-in, we welcome your participation and feedback. We would love to hear from you in relation to what we can offer to make you more productive and, hopefully, make the technology disappear in the background, freeing you to focus on the task at hand and simplifying the process. Give the service the service a try at http://journal.mssandbox.net/.

Other Interesting Services

Two very interesting recently introduced services are Office Live Workspaces and Office Live Small Business. Office Live Small Business is a great example of making online presence and collaboration more accessible through a subscription model, along the lines of what we are trying to achieve with the eJournal Service. For those that are interested in the technical details, underlying Office Live Small Business is Microsoft SharePoint.

Squarely on the business front are two new software-as-a-service offerings, hosted SharePoint and hosted Exchange. Besides being useful to small, medium, and even large business, both of these services should be of useful to universities, colleges, and research institutions.

Introducing the Alpha Preview of the Microsoft eJournal Service

pablofe — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Update

We would like to highlight the collaboration and input from commercial and non-commercial entities in relation to the Microsoft eJournal Service and the Article Authoring add-in projects:

"I am pleased that Microsoft is taking innovative steps to support more open, efficient, and effective scholarly communication in the digital networked environment. For example, the free eJournal Service gives many scholarly societies a valuable new option for online publication and a way to avoid taking on high costs. The Article Authoring and Creative Commons add-ins to Word also are good news, offering capacities that could bring down production costs and allow authors to better manage their intellectual property rights." – Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)

"Partnering with members of the scholarly community, Microsoft External Research is working to facilitate the next step in the transformation of scholarly communications with networking tools built into Microsoft products. The Article Authoring add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 permits authors to produce documents directly in the format used by the NLM's PubMed Central repository, and is a significant step towards producing next-generation documents semantically tied to distributed network databases and relevant ontologies. The Microsoft team has also worked with the arXiv.org database on an automated upload protocol for documents and metadata, both for ingest from individuals and of entire conferences. We look forward to further enhancements, permitting autonomous discovery of related documents, relevant materials, and other linkages, accelerating the move towards a better integrated scholarly knowledge network." - Paul Ginsparg, professor of Physics and Information Science at Cornell University

“NCBI welcomes Microsoft’s decision to support NLM format XML in the Article Authoring add-in for Microsoft Word,” said James Ostell, Ph.D., Chief of the Information Engineering Branch at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine. “NLM’s archival format for electronic documents has been adopted by the Library of Congress and the British Library, and directly supporting this standard in Word is an important step toward simplifying the process to archive the scientific literature. It also opens doors to new possibilities to integrate data and tools with the traditional scientific authoring process.”

"The Add-In will enable scholars and scholarly publishers to use the familiar Word environment for writing, editing, and tagging scholarly articles in the industry standard NLM XML DTD. With about two million articles authored and published every year, the potential impact on this Add-In should not be underestimated." Ahmed Hindawi, CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation

We would also like to thank all other publishers, companies, institutions, and individuals who helped shape the releases we introduced today.

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This morning we are excited to be introducing the Alpha Preview of the Microsoft eJournal Service.

The service is focused primarily on electronic-only journals. Scientists and researchers wanting to start new journals, or those with an existing small journal, should find the system useful for conducting the peer review process, and for archiving published articles to Information Repositories (IRs) and/or the public facing section of their site. It is common for electronic-first journals to publish articles as they are approved, so the service presents an article focused process. The philosophy of the project is to keep the workflows simple and avoid over complicating the management process and site usage with too many options.

The goal of the Alpha Preview is to gather feedback and requirements from the community, to help us pinpoint what additional functionality and changes would be useful to you, as we enhance the service going forward. As part of the Alpha Trial program, sites will be active only for a limited time and are restricted in the number of people that can participate and in the number of articles that can be processed. As the service evolves, the functionality will be expanded, and more open, Beta level, programs will be offered.

The service is open to all file formats, article submissions can be of any format, as configured as part of the site settings. On the archival side, the service supports depositing into any Information Repository that uses the SWORD protocol (for example, the ArXiv repository and EPrints based IRs).

The service nature of this offering means that users don't have to be concerned with procuring and maintaining hardware, or with software installation and updates. The service is usable from any web browser, without requiring any local applications. The service relies on tasks and emails to keep participants informed of the work items assigned to them and associated deadlines.

It is our hope that, as the service evolves, it will help facilitate greater online collaboration for the scholarly communication community, and lead to great dissemination of knowledge.

We welcome your comments and feedback on the service!