XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web

Authors : John W. Maxwell with Meghan MacDonald, Travis Nicholson, Jan Halpape, Sarah Taggart, and Heiko Binder

Book publishers have struggled in recent years to find ways to adopt XML-based editorial and production workflows. Complexity, unfamiliarity, and uncertainty about implementation details contribute to a kind of impasse among publishers—particularly small and medium-sized firms that lack the resources to maintain innovative IT departments that might push them into 21st-century processes.

While the benefits of XML-based processes are trumpeted widely , and the general business case for adopting and investing in XML and related technology has existed for 20 years, gathering the energy and resources to move into an XML-based environment has eluded many.

Could it be that XML-based workflows are simply too complicated to be readily adopted by smaller publishers? And if that is so, what are the implications as we move into the digital era?

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.106

Posté dans EN | Marqué comme

The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date

Author : Alma Swan

This paper presents a summary of reported studies on the Open Access citation advantage. There is a brief introduction to the main issues involved in carrying out such studies, both methodological and interpretive.

The study listing provides some details of the coverage, methodological approach and main conclusions of each study.

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/

Collaborate to co-elaborate knowledge : between necessity and opportunity

In the literature within the field of Information Sciences and Communication, there is no consensus about the definitions of the terms “collaboration” and “cooperation” as a mode of work. In order to fill this gap, we decided to conduct a case study to gather the existing mental representations of an educational community in a junior high school (collège) in the department of Vaucluse in the south of France, about the conception of “collaborative” and “cooperative” work. In this puspose we manage to apply a content analysis methodology combined with a systemic and a constructivist approach to collect and analyze these mental representations. This collection allows us to identify both the objective and the subjective perceptions about collaboration and cooperation existing within this community.

From these perceptions, our main proposition in this paper is to set up a referencial framework for best practices in collaboration to proceed to the “deconstruction” of imperfect mental representations, held as obvious, and to replace them by constructing a correct appropriation. The aim is to properly capture the concepts and practices they imply. Actually, collaboration, boosted by the use of the Internet becomes an area where knowledge is constructed by the interaction between individual knowledge and ressources from the social interactions with the context.

This synergy build a collective experience that enhance the individual capacities to be competent in various situations. For these reasons, nowadays the practice of collaboration is both a neccesity and an opportuny to well done activities and to innovate.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00451018/en/