[Markus Putnings]

My university library in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, is continuing to develop the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite OS-APS 🚀 and we are looking for someone from publishing, media or open access with a successfully completed degree as a bachelor (m/f/d) in the library, information, IT, publishing, editing or media sciences. International applications are welcome if anyone wants to come to beautiful Bavaria 🥨 🍻 :

https://www.jobs.fau.de/jobs/bibliotheksangestellte-r-m-w-d-oder-projektmitarbeiter-in-m-w-d-fuer-das-projekt-os-aps-stemo-98094539/

[Markus Putnings]

Hm somehow the posting here doesn’t work (maybe due to hyperlinks that are attached to the text). Here in the absolutely rudimentary version: I would like to ask all publishers and editors who may be represented here in ‘Open infrastructure for OA books’ (commercial, institutional, professional societies, OJS/OMP series, series via repositories, etc.) to answer the survey on further requirements gathering for the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (see above): https://l0z9tjkih8l.typeform.com/to/mE9pfjpr. The questions can also be viewed in advance as a PDF: https://faubox.rrze.uni-erlangen.de/getlink/fiNWwzUAvxjhGdcEVUbVTD4/OS-APS_survey_english.pdf. Many thanks, Markus

[Markus Putnings]

Dear colleagues,

almost three quarters of a year ago, I briefly informed you about the launch of our BMBF-funded project “Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS)” (see above). The goal is to develop an open-source software that enables the faster publication of various formats in the publisher’s own corporate design by extracting the XML from authors´ Word manuscripts, preparing and enhancing it, and thus publishing it in a media-neutral manner as e.g. PDF, EPUB, or HTML.

Now I would like to ask for your help:

In order to get to know as many publishing workflows as possible and thus make OS-APS usable for various different university publishing houses, we would like to ask you to fill out our online survey if you have a publishing house or publish a journal or are otherwise active in publishing infrastructures (e.g., university press, repository, etc.). The questions refer to the submission and processing of manuscripts, as well as to publication formats that are relevant to your institution/university and future potentials in publishing. With your answers, you can make an important contribution to the development of the software, i.e. please take the time for it if possible.

This is the link to the English version of the survey: https://l0z9tjkih8l.typeform.com/to/mE9pfjpr

Here you´ll find the complete questionnaire as a PDF to get an overview in advance. We hope that this will make it easier for you to complete the survey. It would be great if you could answer the survey within a month, specifically by 17th December 2021.

For questions or feedback we are of course at your disposal: mail@os-aps.de. See also our Homepage, Slack and GitLab for our activities.

Many thanks in advance for your support!

[Markus Putnings]

Hm somehow the posting here doesn’t work. Here in the absolutely rudimentary version: I would like to ask all publishers and editors who may be represented here in ‘Open infrastructure for OA books’ (commercial, institutional, professional societies, OJS/OMP series, series via repositories, etc.) to answer the survey on further requirements gathering for the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (see above): https://l0z9tjkih8l.typeform.com/to/mE9pfjpr. Many thanks, Markus

[Markus Putnings]

Hi,

almost three quarters of a year ago, I briefly informed you about the launch of our BMBF-funded project “Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS)” (see above). The goal is to develop an open-source software that enables the faster publication of various formats in the publisher’s own corporate design by extracting the XML from authors´ Word manuscripts, preparing and enhancing it, and thus publishing it in a media-neutral manner as e.g. PDF, EPUB, or HTML.

Now I would like to ask the participating publishers and editors here for help:

In order to get to know as many publishing workflows as possible and thus make OS-APS usable for various different university publishing houses, we would like to ask you to fill out our online survey. The questions refer to the submission and processing of manuscripts, as well as to publication formats that are relevant to your institution/university and future potentials in publishing. With your answers, you can make an important contribution to the development of the software, i.e. please take the time for it if possible.

This is the link to the English version of the survey: https://l0z9tjkih8l.typeform.com/to/mE9pfjpr

Here you´ll find the complete questionnaire as a PDF to get an overview in advance. We hope that this will make it easier for you to complete the survey.

It would be great if you could answer the survey within a month, specifically by 17th December 2021.  For questions or feedback we are of course at your disposal: mail@os-aps.de. Many thanks in advance for your support!

With kind regards

Markus Putnings and Astrid Hoffmann on behalf of FAU University Press and the OS-APS project partners

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Markus Putnings.

[Markus Putnings]

The Federal Ministry of Research and Education has funded various Open Access projects in Germany (see here). In the following, I briefly present ours, the development of an open source infrastructure called “Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS)” for media-neutral (Open Access) publishing: https://os-aps.de/en/.

The background of the project was the following: According to the findings of a study, the majority of smaller German publishers are not keeping pace with digitization and are therefore not competitive in the long term. There is a lack of financial resources for professional software (e.g., XML editing and content management systems for media-neutral publishing) and expertise or personnel for its implementation in publishing workflows and ongoing support. In addition, there is a lack of market monitoring and servicing of new requests from the scientific community, such as open access publishing.

For this reason, the OA-APS project partners have launched the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS) project. The publishing suite should be available free of charge, i.e. open source, and require little expertise or use of resources.

This should relieve both publishers and authors of the time-consuming task of formatting and typesetting. In addition, various e-book formats (EPUB, PDF, HTML) are created automatically; the PDF in the desired design of the publisher, using typesetting templates.

The project started on Feb. 1, 2021, and will run for 2 years. During this time, the following components will be developed:

• an importer; the importer reads in a wide variety of manuscript formats available from the authors (e.g. Word and OpenDocument), analyzes them, and automatically converts them into a semantically annotated format,
• an editor; semantic information can be added to the imported text as needed through an easy-to-use user interface,
• a typesetting and formatting control; publishers can either select from existing typesetting templates or easily implement their own typesetting template in detail using a Template Development Kit (TDK),
• an export function; at the push of a button, the desired export formats (e.g. PDF, EPUB, HTML) are finally provided, by default Open Access, i.e. DRM-free,
• extensions for OJS and OMP; one project partner is also developing extensions for the Open Journal System and Open Monograph Press to complement the functionalities of these softwares for the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS). On the one hand, it will be possible to import metadata from finalized files into OJS/OMP. Second, an automated export to institutional repositories will be developed to provide uniform data management for institutions.

 

We would like to gather various requirements from publishers and editors in the course of the project (e.g. via surveys, interviews, etc.). Interested parties are very welcome to get in touch: https://os-aps.de/en/participate/.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Markus Putnings.

[Markus Putnings]

Hi Eric, again short answer (above a certain number of characters or links my postings here unfortunately don’t seem to work): yes, we use Pandoc among others. See https://gitlab.com/sciflow/development/-/milestones and for technical questions or cooperations best contact Mr. Eichler or Mr. Borchert: https://join.slack.com/t/scifloworg/shared_invite/zt-xlht19cx-DhTGSYAkNyDP5wAbLQvxpQ

[Markus Putnings]

Hi Eric,
sorry for the long response time, I either overlooked this and/or was too dumb to set up the automatic notifications properly: yes, we also use various existing open source software for this, like just Pandoc. See Gitlab and for technical questions it’s best to contact Mr. Eichler or Mr. Borchert directly or via Slack. I’ll also write a little update on the project below.

Realistically, it has to be said: yes, of course, you have to rely on authors to use Word markup (like headings etc.) reasonably well. We will provide new *.dotx templates for this on the part of FAU University Press and, of course, corresponding notes in our publisher-side author checklists. And yet, rework will certainly be necessary somewhere. For this purpose, there will also be an easy-to-use editor in the open source software, which will functionally follow the importer (and its analysis/XML extraction steps).

[Markus Putnings]

Hi Eric,

oops, your message unfortunately got lost on me at the time (or I forgot to set notifications, need to take a closer look). Yes, it is based on various open source components, including Pandoc. The development components are here: https://gitlab.com/os-aps or more specific https://gitlab.com/sciflow/development/-/milestones. For technical questions it’s best to contact Mr. Bochert or Mr. Eichler, they are the professionals 😉 via email or e.g. Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/scifloworg/shared_invite/zt-xlht19cx-DhTGSYAkNyDP5wAbLQvxpQ

Best
Markus

[Markus Putnings]

Hi Eric, again short answer (above a certain number of characters or links my postings here unfortunately don’t seem to work): yes, we use Pandoc among others. See https://gitlab.com/sciflow/development/-/milestones and for technical questions or cooperations best contact Mr. Eichler or Mr. Borchert.

[Markus Putnings]

Hi Tom.

In fact, something “rudimentarily similar” already exists in several places (e.g. besides Editoria, also in Heidelberg with heiMPT or of course Calibre or similar), but mostly rather specifically embedded in local or proprietary workflows or limited to them.

The OS-APS, on the other hand, is intended to be flexibly usable and integrable by publishers (be it small commercial publishers, university publishers, self-publishers, series editors, etc.). For example, as far as I know, Editoria only offers two export styles for the PDF, Vivliostyle or Paged.js. With OS-APS, there will be much more ready-made styles to choose from (our partner SciFlow already has a lot of experience here) and publishers will also be able to explicitly create their own using the Template Development Kit. This ensures that the PDF always conforms to the usual series or publisher format specifications.

The OS-APS should also be able to import a relatively wide range of manuscript formats that are submitted to publishers (i.e. in addition to Word, OpenDocument, etc., also perspectively LaTeX, InDesign, etc. – we just have to see how far we can get in the next two years) and have open interfaces (SWORD, REST, also to other publishing-relevant open source software such as OJS, OMP, etc.).

But *cough* I basically agree with you: if there had been more time, it might have been interesting to bring one or more of the other existing players on board, too. However, the deadline for the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Research and Education) applications was really short and there were already connections with the current partners, so it was possible to complete the application in the short time available. The more you bring on board, the more time-consuming it is. But of course we are now trying to network with these similar projects, for example with our colleagues in Heidelberg. I.e. if you or others here in the Open Access Books Network know of other similar projects that we have overlooked so far, please let us know.

[Markus Putnings]

Dear Lucy,

the funding guideline was aimed at open access publishers or corresponding publishing activities. Accordingly, this is a bit of a thread running through all the projects:

Sustainability and financing parameters of business and transformation models (CODRIA, TOAA, TransMILL, TU9_Monos, Wallstein-OA, ScholarLedPlus, KOALA, OAdine), quality assurance procedures (PrePrintPlus), simplified workflows or tools for this (our OS-APS, OATbyCO, AuROA, OPTIMETA, OASTRUKTKOMM, OA-META), authoring or research tools (e.g. for the appropriate choice of publication medium) like B!SON, and Open Access strategies and ways to achieve them (OPEN4DE) etc.

However, I don’t know to what extent the selection was made “strategically” or in a complementary or synergy-building way: there were no official instructions to network in advance (if one knew about each other or the ideas) or now after the selected projects became known. But of course we will do this where it makes sense 🙂 E.g. we need to take a closer look at the project OATbyCO on the part of our OS-APS; there seem to be common interests.

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