Summary
In the competitive world of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Journals, it is imperative to publish research as soon as possible, not only to prevent a competitor from gaining the all important "First published in..." accreditation, but also to aid any research in related fields.
Oxford University Press (OUP), a department of the University of Oxford, is the world's largest university press, publishing over 4000 new titles a year. The publishing centres in Oxford and New York produce the majority of these publications, with 10 other sites producing titles around the world. Many of these titles are targeted directly to local communities, but others, particularly those from Oxford and New York, are sold globally.
Articles for inclusion in OUP Journals are submitted in a variety of Word formats. The OUP editors used to use interleaf to manually adapt these articles to the OUP style.
Key issues
OUP needed to streamline the editorial process for the publication of their STM Journals so submitted journals could be published more quickly both to paper and online. OUP needed to take well formatted Microsoft Word documents from a single source and publish them to paper, PDF or HTML with the minimum of formatting work.
Mekon was tasked with developing a suitable publishing system to achieve these goals and then train the OUP editors on the use of the applications and any related software.
Solution description
Adobe FrameMaker+SGML was chosen as it could publish those formats required by OUP. This would prove a more flexible and cost effective solution compared to the existing system based on Interleaf. FrameMaker+SGML would also allow the editors to tag the Word documents in SGML without the need for in-depth knowledge of the tagging language.
OUP originally intended to use PDF files with embedded Open Press Interface (OPI) statements (a protocol that swaps very large image files with lower resolution versions for proofing purposes, whilst allowing the original file to be available for the final version). This can save production costs and allow faster distribution of data to the printers. Unfortunately, the majority of OUP images were saved as Bitmap files, a format that does not support OPI, meaning large images would have to be imported directly into the document. As these images can be as large as 10MB, this would have dramatically slowed the editorial and proofing process. To overcome this, each image was saved in both high and low resolution and Mekon developed an application to substitute the smaller and larger files as needed.
The Editorial Process
Once the Word files have been formatted to the OUP style and structure, they are imported into FrameMaker+SGML, using the Word import filter that converts the paragraph and character formatting.
FrameMaker+SGML files are then checked for any formatting errors, such as an empty paragraph in the wrong place, which would cause the whole conversion process to fail from that point on.
A Frame Development Kit (FDK) connector developed by Mekon performs the process of converting FrameMaker+SGML data into SGML. During this process, all formats and chapter definitions are imported, all table, figure and cross-reference are converted to the OUP style, and all images are imported into anchored frames.
Whilst most editorial tasks are automated, the positioning of tables or graphics and the hyphenation of unusual scientific terms still require the editor’s decision.
The Publishing Process
The data can then be converted to HTML and published on the OUP website or sent to a reproduction bureau for the production of film, which is subsequently delivered to OUP’s printers around the world to be printed, bound and distributed. The data is also forwarded to HighWire Press at Standford University, USA, where the SGML is converted to conform to HighWire’s style and then entered into their database of journals for publishing on their website.
An Ongoing Relationship
As new methods to publish journals and cross-reference articles are developed Mekon continue to update OUP's Document Type Definitions (DTD), templates and applications to meet these new standards and streamline the process further.
The Tools
- Adobe FrameMaker+SGML - Use of Adobe FrameMaker+SGML saved time in typesetting, page layout and additional proofing. The first journals for OUP Journals were published within planned deadlines using previous methods.
- Bespoke Plugins
Benefits
- Faster publishing times
- Lower publishing costs
