Electronic Publishing
Robert Forkel, Vera Osswald, Frank Schulz, Melanie Stetter, Christina Weyher, and André Wobst
There is a wide variety of publishing needs inside scientific organizations – from traditional journal publishing to making available data sources previously only available in print or off line, or needs that can
be addressed best in a scientific blogging environment. Committed to advancing Open Access, the Digital Editions group of the MPDL is tackling some of these in various projects. The guiding principle
is simple: Embrace the web – it should be as easy as possible to link, crawl, share, and reuse the published information, while finding “the right tool for the job”.
Journal Publishing: Living Reviews
Data Publishing: WALS Online
What is Living Reviews about?
What is WALS Online about?
Living Reviews (http://www.livingreviews.org) are scientific online publications that publish
peer-refereed review articles which are regularly updated by their authors to incorporate
new developments in the field. The journals are open access and are published in cooperation
with scientific institutions in- and outside the Max Planck Society.
The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS Online, http://wals.info) is a
large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages
gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than
40 authors. It was published as a book and is now made freely available on the web, in
cooperation with the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
• WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features; each map
shows between 120 and 1,370 languages with different symbols for feature values,
summing up to 58,000 data points.
• It is also a language catalog on 2,500 languages.
• Fine grained commentary function (on data point level) invites scientific discussion.
• Data is made available in various formats (KML, XML, CSV) for reuse.
• The accompanying reference database contains about 6,000 references.
The Living Reviews Journal Family
Publisher: Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Golm
Editor-in-Chief: Bernard Schutz. Online since 1998
Publisher: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg
Editor-in-Chief: Sami Solanki. Online since 2004
Publisher: European Community Studies Association Austria, Vienna
Editor-in-Chief: Gerda Falkner. Online since 2006
Publisher: Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Müncheberg
Editor-in-Chief: K. Bruce Jones, Robert Costanza, Andrew Johnson,
Hubert Wiggering. Online since 2007
Publisher: Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich
Editor-in-Chief: Frank Schimmelfennig. Online since 2009
Online Features
• Reference tracking, update/errata tracking
• History of article revisions
• Support for additional material (movies, program
code)
• Download of various formats for articles (HTML
tarball, PDF) and bibliographies (BibTeX,
EndNote, RIS, RDF+DC)
• Reference databases, containing all references
cited in Living Reviews articles (~ 20,000)
Highlights
• Large and active user community of WALS. Web site has been reviewed in Science.
• More projects with similar scope and approach to follow: Atlas of Pidgin & Creole
Languages, Loanword Typology Project, CLDB
Micropublishing: Exploiting Blog Software
WordPress μ has been adapted for various usage scenarios:
• Add interactivity to journals: WP is being used to create commentary functions for journal
articles.
• Use as mini-CMS: Some journal content (like general information pages) is managed and
edited more conveniently using WP.
LISA Brown Bag
• Another example is the LISA Brown Bag (http://brownbag.lisascience.org), where
publications on arXiv are annotated and collected in a blog to provide an
interdisciplinary overview on current research in the context of the LISA (Laser
Interferometer Space Antenna) cooperation.
Highlights
• The journal concept has made impressive impact on the target communities, as download
rates, citation numbers and feedback from the community prove. For instance, citation
numbers for LRR and LRSP in the WoS currently count to a total of 3,976 and 555
respectively, with an increase of 30% (55%) within the last 12 months.
• May 2009: LREG receives the European Information Association's 2009 Award for
European Information Sources.
• How it works: Users submit arXiv IDs
along with keywords. Blog entries are
generated containing metadata, abstract
and link to the respective publication on
arXiv – building a low-tech overlay
journal on arXiv.
• It was built in cooperation with MPI for
Gravitational Physics.
CARPET: Don't Reinvent the Wheel...
What is CARPET about?
Some user feedback:
• Excellent Journal. Very High quality and one of my favorites.
• Congratulations! I’m a master student and this journal has
been made one important reference in my work, and
hopefully in future research. Thanks.
Software Development & Publication Platform
• A suite of software components (ePubTk – electronic publishing toolkit) has been
developed to support the whole life cycle of a publication: from article planning, to
invitation, authoring, submission, peer-review, processing, publication, and later on
maintenance of updates. It is available open source.
• A central publication platform containing web server, database server, repositories, and
instances of the Editorial Management System (eims) is available for the whole journal family.
Links and Resources
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Journal Portal: http://livingreviews.org
Development Platform: http://dev.livingreviews.org
Web Statistics: http://livingreviews.org/webstats.html
Press Review: http://dev.livingreviews.org/projects/livingreviews/wiki/LivRevPress
Contact:
Christina Weyher: weyher@mpdl.mpg.de
The Community for Academic Reviewing, Publishing and Editorial Technology
(CARPET, http://www.carpet-project.net) is an information platform that supports the
efficient use of available tools and services for scientific ePublishing.
• A catalog of publishing tools and services enhances the visibility and sustainability of
project developments and helps to avoid redundancies.
• The provision of guidelines and recommendations on standards and interoperability
encourages new projects to develop generic publication software.
• A forum cross-links users, developers of publication tools and providers of publication
services.
Project Partners
• Humboldt University, Berlin
• Max Planck Digital Library
• State and University Library, Göttingen
Funding
The project is funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/
July 2009