Part 3: Technical Workflows, Tools, and Platforms for Experimental Publishing, Interaction, and Reuse of Books

Abstract

source software relevant to scholarly publishing' and that 'were 'still alive'-that is, with evidence of active development ' (2019). They emphasise however that this is a dynamic space, and that their cataloguing is a snapshot of a specific moment in time.As such, Maxwell et al.'s analysis is not only based on individual tools but on a consideration of the dynamic landscape as a whole. Their categorising is mainly based on exclusion, where they did not include tools and projects that were closed-source, cloud-based services, research (instead of publishing) tools, library infrastructure, DIY ad-hoc toolchains, and dormant projects.The key themes that informed their research were sustainability, scale, collaboration, and ecosystem integration. One key research question was 'who will care about these projects?' In other words, 'care enough to fund, contribute, promote, use, and ultimately further their useful life? What are the values and mechanisms that cause people-especially external stakeholders-to care enough about these projects to keep them alive, and even thriving, going forward?' (2019). The gap that they have noticed as part of their research is one of co-ordination and integration between and among projects. In other words, there is a lack of interoperability and incentives for collaboration between projects. In Maxwell et al.'s mapping of the tools and projects they emphasise a few main characteristics: Key findings were issues of: Difference between journal publishing and book publishing Centralised vs distributed models Old projects and new projects Functional scope (i.e., development across hypothetical workflow stages) Operational details (development features, languages and frameworks, licenses, and funding) Traditional functions vs. new capacities (i.e., interactive scholarly works) Technological approaches and trends (approaches to XML, conversion and ingestion strategies) Workflow modeling and management Innovating new possibilitiesSiloed development, with the recommendation that 'where possible, collaboration, standardization, and even common code layers can provide considerable benefit to project ambitions, functionality, and sustainability' ("Prospects," pp. 20-1).

Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors

“…As outlined in more detail in Mars et al 2021, PubPub is a collaborative writing platform that also integrates an annotation layer to facilitate commentary and peer review. In an exemplary Open Peer Review process via PubPub, Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia made the manuscript of their-now published-Annotation volume, available online via the PubPub platform, and invited feedback via in-platform annotations and comments from the wider scholarly community.…”

“…Their mission is to 'deploy annotations across much of scholarship' [and, to us] seems [a very] reasonable and hopefully sustainable[approach]. Hypothes.is has a special partnership program with publishers and educational institutions which often results in new features and spin-off projects, including a collaboration with the ReadiumJS team to bring annotations to EPUBs, initiated by NYU Press"(Mars, Steiner, and Adema 2021).…”

“…From blogposts to papers and conference presentations, and eventually to a thesis, a wiki, a CommentPress version, and several articles, Living Books further evolved into a book published by the MIT Press, in addition to an online PubPub version that can be updated, remixed, and commented upon. [...E]xperimenting with different versions, platforms, and media to communicate my research, served as an opportunity to reflect critically on the way the research and publishing workflow is currently (teleologically and hierarchically) set up, and how it has been fully integrated within certain institutional and commercial settings"(Adema 2021).For a more expansive overview, may we refer the inclined reader to the typology developed as part of our Books Contain Multitudes report, with particular reference to the segment on Versioned Books in Part 2(Mars, Steiner, and Adema 2021).Citing scholarly works is one of the fundamental re-use practices established in academic culture. Making citation data available in an open and machine-readable way is yet another way to invite re-use of one's work.…”

“…See git-based collaborative text editing inMars et al 2021, and PubPub's in-editor versioning approach described in more detail in Steiner 2020.37 It might be noted here that while git is the most popular of version control systems, other forms such as Subversion, RCS, CVS, or Mercurial might also be amenable to setting up a publishing infrastructure (although we don't know of any practical examples that use these ecosystems for the purpose of digital book publishing).…”