Content providers across all domains (scientific publishing, news, education, books) are facing the very same challenges when it comes to implementing an effective digital publishing workflow. From receiving a manuscript to peer review to publishing many manual steps are necessary. Communication usually happens offline (via email etc.) which is not only costly and time-consuming but also error-prone and intransparent. An ultimate goal would be to create a fully integrated, interactive environment that closes the gap between authors and publishers.
On the authors side we want a document authoring tool available as web-based component as well as local application e.g., for mobile devices, which adopts semantic editing, which is being an essential foundation for increasing data re-usability. A seamless integration for annontations and comments would enable authors to collaborate with co-authors or just to make personal notes. They should be able to work offline and sychronize their changes at a later time having access to the full history of changes made to the document. Finally, submitting manuscripts to publishers should be simple as with one single click.
Publishers would integrate the very same technology into their peer-review system. Reviewers could create evaluations adding comments and annotations directly to submitted documents. For editors it will be much easier to manage the review process, having evaluations displayed directly with a document. The tight integration of authoring tools into the process would allow editors to provide authors with instant feedback. A more iterative reviewing process would become possible which at the end will lead to a higher quality of the final publications.
When it comes to publishing, a simple document model which is carried by the idea of semantic editing, forms the basis for creating tools to address different output channels. Not only the process of typesetting can be optimized greatly, also digital document formats (PDF, HTML, epub) can be created using a common technology and consumer devices (such as mobiles and tablets) can be reached easily.
A new reading experience exploiting the full potential of digitial media (cross references, multi-media content, etc.) as demonstrated in a first attempt with the elife Lens reader will eventually establish a truely competitive alternative to publications printed on paper increasing the acceptance of digital publications in general. In addition to a web-based reader, there should be a consumer application which allows reading documents offline. Integrated support for annotations and comments would allow users to create personal notes easily and furthermore would establish a direct channel between authors and readers. Creating such a means for communication and interaction will foster a post-publishing review process and contribute to further improvement of publications.
From our experience we think that pursuing the overall goal all at once is not realistic. Publishers are in a strong economic competition with each other and are not taking a greater financial risk to replace their established workflows. On the other hand, authors typically are used to certain text-editing tools and prefer to stick with their tool chains as long there is no real extra benefit. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to increase the acceptance for a new solution by bringing instant benefit for both sides, authors and publishers.
We would like to create a reading experience that takes full advantage of the opportunities offered by digital media. While there are existing solutions for annotating web-content, they aren't yet frequently used, mostly because of usability and integration issues. We would build this on top of the Substance technology stack which has been successfully integrated by eLife and Landes Bioscience. Beyond a web-based reader, which can easily be integrated into a publisher's web-site, we want to make the same reading environment available as an application for consumer devices, such as mobiles and tablets.
We would like to integrate a seamless support for annotations and comments into the reader. Researchers will be provided with a means to manage personal notes conveniently and to communicate and collaborate with co-authors.
More importantly, a culture of post-publishing review will be established, as the commenting system opens a platform for post-publishing review. As a backend technology we want to use Hypothes.is and we are already setting up a collaboration.
In 2013 Ivan Grubisic and Michael Aufreiter have developed an interactive reading interface for scientific content, eLife Lens.
This tool is built on top of the Substance technology stack and has been successfully integrated by eLife and Landes Bioscience.
Based on the work we've already done in the past three years, we can immediately start to implement the proposed ideas. The following components will be crucial with regards to the technical realization of the project.
With the Substance Document Model we are defining an open framework for manipulating structured digital documents in the browser. It is designed to ensure consistency, stricly separates content from presentation and provides an easy to use API. This abstract model serves as an interface for custom document models, that can be defined by domain experts. The Substance Document Model is unique in that it doesn't require any server side infrastructure, which makes it really easy to integarte into exisiting systems. Using the provided API users can create content elements and annotate them in various ways. We also have implemented support for incremental changes and versioning, which is crucial for implementing collaborative workflows.
We'll build out annotation support and introduce an persistence mechanism for storing annotations offline and online.
The web browser provides a unified platform for viewing content. Instead of binding the content to a presentation-focused format, we can view the content as data and build a new generation of tools.
eLife Lens is just one example that demonstrates what today's modern browsers are capable of. We'd like to continue with that work, creating a highly customizable reading environment optimized for digital content and ready to be integrated into production workflows. The proposed interface is being designed to support desktops (2-panel view) and mobile (details on demand).
We'd like to utilize our experience from building Substance and eLife Lens and implement a functioning prototype. We'll design an integrated user interface capable of annotations and comments. Since commenting features should be accessible from mobile devices as well, there will be a specialized user interface, addressing those needs.
While Substance will focus on the user interface, Hypothes.is is responsible for providing a suiteable API for storing and querying annotations.
In the final stage we'll integrate the improved reader into a real test bed, provided by eLife and other publishers.
First we'll focus on the implementation of annotations and comments and incorporate it with our existing reading interface (~ 2 months). Once those parts are ready, we will start integrating with the Hypothes.is platform (~ 1 month). While setting up the testing environment at eLife (~ 1 month) we'll polish the user interface with an emphasis on a seamless mobile experience (~ 2 months).
Overall we think that this project we, the Substance Team (Michael Aufreiter, Oliver Buchtala) together with Ivan Grubisic, can conduct this project within 6 months.