Microsoft's Article Authoring Add-in

["Greg Tananbaum" <gtananbaum@gmail.com>]

Of possible interest to list members.  Microsoft, while 
shuttering its Live Search Academic and Live Search Books 
projects, is still pursuing some interesting avenues within the 
scholarly publishing territory.

Best, Greg

Greg Tananbaum
Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
(510) 295-7504
gtananbaum@gmail.com
http://www.scholarnext.com

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Beta of Microsoft's Article Authoring Add-in Now Available 
Broadly for Download Enabling Journals to Better Connect with 
Scientific Authors in a Digital World

REDMOND, Wash. - May 30, 2008

At the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in 
Boston, Microsoft announced the wide availability of the Beta 1 
release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007.

In addition to enabling Word users to open and save documents 
using the National Library of Medicine's XML Journal Publishing 
format, used for the authoring of scientific articles, the Beta 1 
release adds support for the NCBI Book format, used for authoring 
book chapters for digital books.

Enabling Journals to Better Connect with Authors in a Digital 
World

A key value of the Article Authoring add-in is in enabling 
editors at scientific and technical journals to create article 
templates, tailored for their individual journals' requirements. 
These templates will assist authors in writing articles with 
greater consistency in relation to the structure of the articles, 
better reflecting the content requirements of the journals, and 
in expressing semantic information which is key for the search 
and consumption of articles in digital form.

"The Add-In is a very positive development that will help 
scholars to write and tag their articles in the industry-standard 
NLM XML DTD, and will help publishers to process these articles 
in their editorial and production departments. We are pleased to 
be working with Microsoft on testing and refining this important 
tool that will benefit scholars and scholarly publishers alike", 
said Ahmed Hindawi, CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation.

Preserving Information for Archiving and Search

The Article Authoring add-in enables authors to express a greater 
variety of semantic information, and metadata, as part of writing 
articles.  This semantic information, captured in the XML format 
and preserved based on the extensibility in the Open XML 
standard, will prove valuable in improving the results from 
search queries and for the long term archival of scientific 
information.

In addition to preserving information that is native to Microsoft 
Word, the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring add-in also 
preserves Math information from controls, such as Design 
Science's MathType, when saving Word documents to the NLM XML 
format.  Paul Topping, President and CEO of Design Science, Inc., 
stated that "We were happy to work with Microsoft to add support 
for Equation Editor and MathType equations to the Article 
Authoring add-in. Since at least 85% of the articles containing 
math submitted to scientific journals have equations in those 
formats, this support is critical."

The Open XML standard, with its capabilities to support 
custom-schemas, enables the Word add-in to support the entire set 
of rich information encoded by the NLM format. The add-in also 
provides easy access to the metadata in the NLM format, both by 
journal editors and by authors, directly from within the Word 
user interface.  The broad availability of the Beta 1 release 
provides a way for the different communities, such as authors, 
journals, digital archives, and software vendors, to evaluate the 
technology and provide feedback, guiding further development of 
the add-in towards its initial release in the second half of 
2008.

Information on how to download the Beta 1 release of the Article 
Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 can be found at 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=09c55527-0759-4d6d-ae02-51e90131997e&displaylang=en&tm

Additional resources are available at the following sites:

Pablo Fernicola's blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/exscientia/
Microsoft Research, scholarly/scientific publishing web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly-publishing.mspx

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