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Heidelberg, 10.7.2002
Gertraud Griepke
Journals/LINK Director
Springer-Verlag
griepke@springer.de
Springer-Verlag's E-publishing Strategy
Unique challenges are involved in setting up and running a successful online service for scientific mathematical content. Many of the aspects are similar to other online information services on the internet. Publishing scientific content requires rapid and high-quality digital production workflows with enhanced functionality. Today's digital content must be visible in tomorrow's digital archives.
It is of paramount importance to harmonise today's digital workflow with retro-digitisation projects, in order to avoid data conversion on a large scale in the future. Today's user of digital content is going to expect similarities in the provision of digital content in legacy material as well.
Springer e-publishing strategy.
Since Springer began offering digital journal content in 1994 (Numerische Mathematik), the online publishing process has been an integral part of the print publication process. In order to meet our authors' and readers' requirements, we need to focus on the e-publishing process first.
The challenge: Science publishers can only be successful if they anticipate the changing forces in the field of science publishing and respond accordingly with,
- rapid publication
- availability on the Internet
- high-quality products
- increased online functionality.
New paradigm:
Springer-Verlag took major steps in revamping its procedures, creating a new paradigm for producing and publishing scientific material.
Digital production and publishing is an innovative process of complex and interdependent steps, many of which are themselves innovative. By recombining the important and transformed modules, a process has been created which takes only half the time to publish the print editions and shortens the time to online publication by two-thirds.
Important modules in this process:
- Supplying potential authors with templates (TEX), to support the preparation of manuscripts which create a framework for automatic insertion of tags for numerous structures.
- A workflow in which much data movement has been automated.
- Creation of digital proofs of the complete text, including figures provided to the author prior to page composition.
- Validation of SGML data for an article, immediately after completion of author corrections.
- Automatic publication of an HTML version of the article online, identified by its digital object identifier (DOI) and registered with CrossRef.
- Online transmission of the SGML data to the composer of automatic page makers.
- Publication of the PDF files.
- Delivery of SGML and PDF pairs for third party, e-content syndication.