hi y’all
I have just been reading some posts on Scholarly Kitchen about content creation and the next wave of authoring systems.
It seems the STM sector has long been in need of developing a solution to get their publishing processes out of various traps. The most obvious trap is MS Word. A horrible format, to be sure, but it has long been the default file format for manuscript production, with a small tip of the hat to LaTeX for the technologically gifted. Their recent discussions have mainly been about online ‘authoring systems,’ going beyond MS Word to anticipate documents that are fully transparent to whatever combination of machine and human interactions play a part in understanding and processing the information.
This ‘get-out-of-MS-Word-free’ card is a very attractive proposition. MS Word is basically a binary blob to most publishing systems (even though in actual fact the format of .docx is XML -thereby also abruptly ending the false argument that XML inherently brings structure). As a ‘binary’ (go with me on this for now) MS Word is not transparent to the publication system, there is no record of when the author has worked on it; finding out what they have done since version xxx.xxx and version xxxx.xxxxxxxx is very difficult; nobody else can work on it when the author is also working on it, and there is no control over structure etc etc etc
So getting away from reliance on MS Word is the aim. But getting into (what I might rename as) an ‘authoring only‘ platform – is not the solution.
What is interesting about the SK forum, is that there seems to be a very clear distinction in the minds of publishers between the worlds of the author and the publisher. Most of the comments make this split, and there is much talk of ‘authoring systems’.
It seems a little bizarre to me, as I don’t think it’s wise to think about the author and the publisher as being distinct entities. It’s not a matter of author and publisher working on separate processes to shepherd a manuscript through to publication: it is very much a team effort. Authors and publishers work together in a way that should not be dichotomised: they are a team.
If we don’t acknowledge that, then we will not be able to design good publication systems. There is a lot of unclear thinking around this topic at the moment. The “authoring system” model assumes that content is made in an authoring system by a writer, and then migrates to the publisher’s submission, processing and publishing system, where the publisher does some stuff, and then at various times pings the author back to make changes to metadata, submission information, the manuscript and attendant assets (eg figures)…
In this model, next the author takes the manuscript out of the publisher’s system, ingests to the old authoring system, works on it, exports it, and re-ingests it into the publisher’s system… Hmmm…this cycle is exactly one of the pain points we were trying to avoid by getting away from Microsoft Word.
It seems to me that the current trend to build better authoring systems is a mistake. It is based on the false assumption that ‘MS Word’ is the problem, without realising that there is more to it. Word has been seen as the problem only because it has been the only problem in town. We don’t need better ‘authoring systems’ that repeat the separation between writing and publishing that is inherent in reliance on MS Word. We shouldn’t invest in new authoring systems and believe in them purely because they are ‘not Microsoft Word’. Rather, we need documents to be contained within submission and processing systems for the entire duration of their life, and they need to be completely operational and transparent within that system to all parties that must work on them. Without understanding that need, we are merely mitigating the problem by small steps whilst fooling ourselves that we have solved the larger problem.
We don’t want the author-publisher response/change cycle (a collaborative effort by the team which includes author and publisher) to be in separate systems. We want them working together in the same system. We need teams to work together in the most efficient way possible, and that is in the same (real world- or cyber-) space. Teams work best when they work in the same *space.
Though I see the current efforts towards authoring system development to be interesting, unless they are integrated with processing and workflow features, they will sooner or later be made redundant.
Colophon: written by Adam in 30 mins in a tizz. Tinkered with by Raewyn for another 30 mins. Written using Ghost software (free software!)
