Scholarly publishing with WordPress (existing work and input from academic community)

[Joss Winn]

Hi there,

I want to say "thanks", offer a couple of suggestions and ask about the long-term plans for Annotum.

Thanks for creating Annotum. It's a much needed and welcome piece of work. And thanks (Google??) for choosing WordPress and its open source community to work with. I really hope that it receives input from academic technologists like myself. It looks like Annotum offers us a significant step towards creating a more complete and accessible web-based scholarly authoring and publishing environment. 

I'm an academic and technologist in a UK university and, like others, have been using and advocating WordPress for scholarly work for a few years. A while back I collected a bunch of blog posts here: 

http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2010/10/25/rss-in-rss-out-experimenting-with-wordpress-for-scholarly-publishing/

More importantly, I want to make sure you're aware of other work that is happening, which could complement Annotum, in particular the work around 'Scholarly HTML' (which I've not been involved in but know the people who are and am sure they'll be interested in your work): http://scholarlyhtml.org/ and http://ptsefton.com/2011/03/12/scholarly-html-new-approaches-to-authoring-scientific-papers.htm  Also, if we accept that articles will still be authored in Word Processors for some time to come, this is a useful piece of work which may form part of the tool chain to WordPress/Annotum: http://ptsefton.com/2011/10/18/worddown-word-to-html5-conversion-tool.htm

See also the jiscPub project: http://jiscpub.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ (again, the work of Peter Sefton and sponsored by JISC, who will be interested in your work). Work Package 3 focuses on WordPress http://jiscpub.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2011/03/03/workpackage-3/ http://jiscpub.blogs.edina.ac.uk/?s=wordpress

Finally, I'd like to ask what are the core developer's long term plans for Annotum? Are you committed to working with the WordPress/academic community or do you hope that it will be picked up by others who will lead on it? It seems to have been kicked off by Google's plans to close down Knol. Have they provided any long-term support for core development of Annotum?

Cheers and thanks again.

Joss

[Carl Leubsdorf, Jr.]

Please see my responses below, inline.

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 1:52 AM, Joss Winn <joss...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I want to say "thanks", offer a couple of suggestions and ask about the long-term plans for Annotum.

And thank you for taking the time to respond with these thoughts.

 

Thanks for creating Annotum. It's a much needed and welcome piece of work. And thanks (Google??) for choosing WordPress and its open source community to work with. I really hope that it receives input from academic technologists like myself. It looks like Annotum offers us a significant step towards creating a more complete and accessible web-based scholarly authoring and publishing environment. 

Google paid. Solvitor (essentially: me)  came up with the concept and feature set and worked very closely with Crowd Favorite on the implementation.  We have a roadmap that we hope will let Annotum replace a significant percentage of current journal publishing efforts over time -- cheaper and better is the idea.  There will always be many legacy journals, just like there will (I hope!) always be the New York Times.  But we also have TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and others that have taken a different, more accessible path. So we hope it shall be for Annotum.

 

I'm an academic and technologist in a UK university and, like others, have been using and advocating WordPress for scholarly work for a few years. A while back I collected a bunch of blog posts here: 

http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2010/10/25/rss-in-rss-out-experimenting-with-wordpress-for-scholarly-publishing/

More importantly, I want to make sure you're aware of other work that is happening, which could complement Annotum, in particular the work around 'Scholarly HTML' (which I've not been involved in but know the people who are and am sure they'll be interested in your work): http://scholarlyhtml.org/ and http://ptsefton.com/2011/03/12/scholarly-html-new-approaches-to-authoring-scientific-papers.htm  Also, if we accept that articles will still be authored in Word Processors for some time to come, this is a useful piece of work which may form part of the tool chain to WordPress/Annotum: http://ptsefton.com/2011/10/18/worddown-word-to-html5-conversion-tool.htm

Annotum has an "ok" 'paste from word' function.  I would love to build in something like Pandoc to get to the point where we can accept multiple import-export formats.

Also, I am aware of these various efforts to some extent, although I've been pretty heads-down for the last several months getting Annotum to ship.

Can you recommend any conferences or other group settings that I should/could attend? We'll likely do most of our collaboration online, either through this discussion group, or perhaps on the Annotum help desk site (which, being on UserVoice, has some decent feedback/voting/discussion fuctionality).  But I'm happy to travel to speak about and advocate for Annotum. Very open to suggestions on the best way(s) to collaborate further.

See also the jiscPub project: http://jiscpub.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ (again, the work of Peter Sefton and sponsored by JISC, who will be interested in your work). Work Package 3 focuses on WordPress http://jiscpub.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2011/03/03/workpackage-3/ http://jiscpub.blogs.edina.ac.uk/?s=wordpress

Finally, I'd like to ask what are the core developer's long term plans for Annotum? Are you committed to working with the WordPress/academic community or do you hope that it will be picked up by others who will lead on it? It seems to have been kicked off by Google's plans to close down Knol. Have they provided any long-term support for core development of Annotum?

I personally am very committed to working on Annotum for the long term and I will continue to work with Crowd Favorite on enhancements.  That said, it's not a charity - we do seek funding for future work.  Google has done their part - now it is up to me (and others?) to find ways to keep this going.

Cheers and thanks again.

Thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving from the USA. 

Joss

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_______________________
Carl Leubsdorf, Jr.
Solvitor ► Problem Solved.
+1 240 389 2255
ca...@solvitor.com

[Fenner...@mh-hannover.de]

John and Carl,

 

I am also an academic developer following the development of Annotum. There are number of people doing interesting scholarly things with Wordpress, but I think it is important that we work together to build something that is good enough to compete with the current offerings for manuscript writing and submission. I am very happy about Annotum not only because it is a cool product, but because it is a big step forward in that direction.

 

Funding and conferences are of course two good ways to move this forward. I currently have no answer to the funding question, but I am happy to promote Annotum where possible. I did a quick Annotum demo at the Science Online London Conference in September, and I will do a presentation with Steve Petiffer at the UKSG Conference (March 26-28 in Glasgow) on HTML5 vs. PDF as publishing formats. This is of course a nice opportunity to show what Annotum can do. I will also attend the ScienceOnline2012 conference (January 19-21, North Carolina) which will be attended by more than 400 scientists, science bloggers and science communicators, many of whom are Wordpress users. Probably too late to squeeze Annotum into the program, but I will of course spread the word. Carl, please contact me if you consider attending. A workshop dedicated to "Wordpress for Scientists" would also be a great idea, and should include ample time for hacking.

 

Best,

 

Martin

 

 

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Von: ann...@googlegroups.com [mailto:ann...@googlegroups.com] Im Auftrag von Carl Leubsdorf, Jr.
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 24. November 2011 08:07
An: ann...@googlegroups.com
Betreff: Re: [annotum] Scholarly publishing with WordPress (existing work and input from academic community)

[Joss Winn]

Hi Carl,

On 24 Nov 2011, at 07:06, Carl Leubsdorf, Jr. wrote:

We have a roadmap that we hope will let Annotum replace a significant percentage of current journal publishing efforts over time -- cheaper and better is the idea.  

Is that roadmap published anywhere? Are you referring to http://annotum.org/system-vision-and-use-cases/

More importantly, I want to make sure you're aware of other work that is happening, which could complement Annotum, in particular the work around 'Scholarly HTML' (which I've not been involved in but know the people who are and am sure they'll be interested in your work): http://scholarlyhtml.org/ and http://ptsefton.com/2011/03/12/scholarly-html-new-approaches-to-authoring-scientific-papers.htm  Also, if we accept that articles will still be authored in Word Processors for some time to come, this is a useful piece of work which may form part of the tool chain to WordPress/Annotum: http://ptsefton.com/2011/10/18/worddown-word-to-html5-conversion-tool.htm

Annotum has an "ok" 'paste from word' function.  I would love to build in something like Pandoc to get to the point where we can accept multiple import-export formats.

We faced this problem when working on the JISCPress project, which developed the 'digressit' plugin for WordPress: http://jiscpress.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/12/16/the-jiscpress-prototype-demonstrator-platform/ and http://digress.it/

I've copied and pasted from Word many many times, especially when we were running http://writetoreply.org (a predecessor of http://digress.it). Is Annotum's 'paste from word' function different to the built-in function? It works OK, but of course isn't ideal. A method of importing from Word would be preferable I think, which then allows the author/editor to work on the document in WordPress. Copying and pasting feels like a step backwards. Ideally authors would write directly in the native editor but that's not about to happen anytime soon. Conversion tools, like Peter Sefton's, will be useful, but I think the natural inclination for an authoring writing in a word processor, is to want to 'upload' or 'submit' it to the publishing system, not convert or copy and paste.

Can you recommend any conferences or other group settings that I should/could attend? We'll likely do most of our collaboration online, either through this discussion group, or perhaps on the Annotum help desk site (which, being on UserVoice, has some decent feedback/voting/discussion fuctionality).  But I'm happy to travel to speak about and advocate for Annotum. Very open to suggestions on the best way(s) to collaborate further.

I'd recommend that you keep an eye on JISC, who fund much of the innovative use of technology in UK Higher and Further Education. They've funded the jiscPub and JISCPress projects as well as new work on Scholarly HTML and the use of HTML5 in academia. You might also look out for new funding calls as conferences and workshops tend to go hand in hand with new programmes of funding:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx

To benefit from their funding, you'd need to seek a UK partner, but that's not too difficult. We did it with the development of digress.it, where the developer lives in San Francisco and worked freelance for us.

Finally, I'd like to ask what are the core developer's long term plans for Annotum? Are you committed to working with the WordPress/academic community or do you hope that it will be picked up by others who will lead on it? It seems to have been kicked off by Google's plans to close down Knol. Have they provided any long-term support for core development of Annotum?

I personally am very committed to working on Annotum for the long term and I will continue to work with Crowd Favorite on enhancements.  That said, it's not a charity - we do seek funding for future work.  Google has done their part - now it is up to me (and others?) to find ways to keep this going.

Sure. Of course. Much of the really interesting and exploratory work in the UK, as well as large programmes of sector-wide change happen because of JISC, so watch the link above. Having said that, many of us are trying to do work in this area regardless of funding. I've been out of the loop for a while working on other things, but there are lots of people interested in using WordPress in higher education and a number of those people have a specific interest in how WordPress meets scholar's needs, which you know all about. I see you're on the WordPress for Scientists list. 

Cheers and thanks again.

Thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving from the USA. 

All the best. I hope to play around with Annotum soon and might even have a use case for it, as there are two projects I'm aware of at my own university that are trying to set up a journal and so far, I've only really had OJS to offer them.

Joss

-- 
_______________________
Carl Leubsdorf, Jr.
Solvitor ► Problem Solved.
+1 240 389 2255
ca...@solvitor.com

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[Joss Winn]

Hi Carl, 

There's a funding call out that might be suitable for further development of Annotum:

http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/11/29/oerri/

I'm not really looking for a new project myself, although am open to suggestions if you have an idea and are you're looking for a UK partner working in HE. It might be that I could suggest someone else, too.

Cheers

Joss