Technical Aspects in Scientific Publishing:

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Technical Aspects in Scientific Publishing A
Scientific Publisher's Perspective Chi Wai
(Rick) Lee World Scientific Publishing
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World Scientific Publishing

• A scientific publisher formed in 1981
• Publish over 120 journals and 500 books a year
• Exclusive publisher for Nobel Lectures
• Own and operate the Imperial College Press
• Started putting journals online since 1996
• One of the first 16 publishers who joined
  Crossref when it was formed in 1999

3
Publishing Cycle
Acquisition
Production
Dissemination
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Acquisition

• Author / Publisher Matchmaking Process
• Where to find good authors?
• How to attract authors to submit their
  manuscripts?
• Submission and Peer Review Process
• How to submit manuscript in the right format?
• Where to find the right reviewers?

5
Production

• Content Management System
• Production Platforms
• Print-Centric vs Web-Centric Workflow
• Standard TeX/LaTeX, Word or XML Formats
• Special Platform, e.g.
• ChemDraw
• EndNotes

6
Production

• Web-Centric Publishing
• Semantic markup using XML
• Cross-referencing
• Multimedia and other supplementary data support

7
Dissemination

• Distribution Availability
• Various Platforms and Formats
• e.g. PubMed, CAS, Google Scholar, OCLC, NASA etc.
• Dark Archives
• e.g. LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, JSTOR, Portico etc.
• Open vs Pay Access
• Who pay to publish and maintain the content?
• What's the impact?

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Dissemination

• Sales Marketing
• Channels
• From conventional to unconventional channels
• Business Models
• From standard to non-standard models
• Citation Index and Impact Factor
• An important marketing acquisition tool
• Advance Publication
• Improve turnaround time and visibility

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What's Next?

• CRC (Camera-Ready Copy) to WRC (Web-Ready Copy)
• Author provides WRC based on industrial standards
• Common formats to facilitate EDI such as RDF
• Production Automation
• Conversion from non-semantic format to semantic
  format
• Real-time publishing?

10
What's Next?

• Platform and Interface
• PDF beyond, or something else?
• Interface simple and convenient vs powerful and
  sophisticated
• Personalized library and database that assimilate
  all relevant info in a single interface?

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What's Next?

• Search, Discovery Impact Measures
• Data mining such as finding readers or potential
  authors through profiling, citation analysis etc.
• Measures of impact based on a set of criteria in
  addition to impact factor