Re: scientific publishing process (was Re: Cost and access)

On 05 Oct 2014, at 22:19 , Luca Matteis <lmatteis@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>> The real problem is still the missing tooling. Authors, even if technically savy like this community, want to do what they set up to do: write their papers as quickly as possible. They do not want to spend their time going through some esoteric CSS massaging, for example. Let us face it: we are not yet there. The tools for authoring are still very poor.
> 
> But are they still very poor? I mean, I think there are more tools for
> rendering HTML than there are for rendering Latex. In fact there are
> probably more tools for rendering HTML than anything else out there,
> because HTML is used more than anything else. Because HTML powers the
> Web!
> 
> You can write in Word, and export in HTML. You can write in Markdown
> and export in HTML. You can probably write in Latex and export in HTML
> as well :)
> 
> The tools are not the problem. The problem to me is the printing
> afterwords. Conferences/workshops need to print the publications.
> Printing consistent Latex/PDF templates is a lot easier than printing
> inconsistent (layout wise) HTML pages.

Interestingly, my experience is just about the opposite. Sorry:-)

Yes, tools to _render_ HTML are around. But the issue is the _production_ of those pages (and, to make one step further alongside my original mail, to produce an ePub once the HTML pages are around). Word (as Laura remarked) produces nearly useless HTML; OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not much better I am afraid. Markdown is fine indeed, and markdown editors like Mou produce proper HTML, but the markup (sic!) facilities of markdown are limited. It is all right for simple books, but I suspect it would be more of a problem for scientific articles. (But yes, that is an avenue to explore.) WYSIWYG HTML editors exist by now, but I am not sure they are satisfactory either (I use BlueGriffon often, but I still have to switch back and forth between source mode and WYSIWYG mode, which beats the purpose). Of course, I could expect a Web technology related crows to use HTML source editing directly but the experience by Daniel and myself with the World Wide Web conference(!) is that people do not want to do that. (Researchers in, say, Web Search have proven to be unable or unwilling to edit HTML source. It was a real surprise...). Ie, the authoring tool offers are still limited.

On the other hand... how long do we want to care about printing? The WWW conference (to stay with that example) has given up on printed proceedings for a while. The proceedings are published by the ACM and offered through their digital library, and the individual papers are available on-line on the conference site. I know that ISWC and (I believe) ESWC still produce printed Springer Proceedings but I wonder how long; who needs those in print? I must admit that I have not picked up a printed proceedings or journal article for many years, I look for the online versions instead. Of course, I may print a single paper because I want to read it while, for example, on the train, but then I do not really care about the way it looks. And, with tablets, even this usage is becoming less significant. That being said, producing a proper PDF from HTML is again not a problem, CSS has a number of page/print specific terms and is being actively worked on in this respect.

Cheers

Ivan 

> 
> Best,
> Luca


----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
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