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Single-Source Collaborative Publishing

Project description

Innovative collaborative publishing tools

Book publishing involves various stakeholders and often relies on complex tools, resulting in inefficient workflows where authors and editors cannot make direct changes once content is formatted. Manual labour involved in creating different output formats (such as PDF, ePub, or HTML) and new requirements, like the European accessibility directive, increase costs. The ERC-funded OnePub project will develop collaborative publishing tools based on a single document source that acts as the ‘ground truth’ for content and layout. It will focus on textbooks and academic publications with rich content, strict requirements, and tight deadlines. The project will establish a unified document format, create collaborative editors, and build an open architecture that lets software companies provide components while publishers select their preferred tools.

Objective

Book publishing involves many stakeholders and a complex set of inflexible tools and formats. Current workflows are inefficient because authors and editors cannot make changes directly to the content once it has been laid out. They are costly because creating different output formats, such as PDF, ePub or HTML requires manual labor. Finally, new requirements such as the European directive on accessibility incur additional costs and delays.

The goal of the OnePub POC project is to demonstrate the feasibility and value of a book production workflow based on a set of collaborative editing tools and a single document source representing the “ground truth” of the book content and layout. The editing tools will be tailored to the needs of each stakeholder, e.g. author, editor or typesetter, and will feature innovative interaction techniques from the PI’s ERC project ONE.

The project will focus on textbooks and academic publications as its testbed because they feature some of the most stringent constraints in terms of content types and content layout. They also run on tight deadlines, emphasizing the need for an efficient process.

OnePub will define a unified format for the document source, create several collaborative document editors, and develop an open and extensible architecture so that new editors and add-ons can be added to the workflow. Together, these developments will set the stage for a new ecosystem for the publishing industry, with a level-playing field where software companies can provide components while publishers and their service contractors can decide which components to use for their workflows.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.

Host institution

UNIVERSITE PARIS-SACLAY
Net EU contribution
€ 150 000,00
Address
BATIMENT BREGUET - 3 RUE JOLIOT CURIE
91190 Gif-Sur-Yvette
France

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Region
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Essonne
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (1)

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