INSIGHT INTO XML

XML is King
Jabin White of medical publishers Elsevier explains why he would be scared to contemplate the future of scientific and medical publishing without XML...

JABIN WHITE (PICTURED) IS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of Electronic Production for Health Sciences at Elsevier Science. White started in health sciences publishing as an editorial assistant, and learned SGML in the mid-1990s working on the drug reference Physicians GenRx at Mosby. When XML arrived on the scene, White recognized it as the next logical step in STM publishing and embraced it.

During a brief hiatus in his busy schedule, DCLnews asked him why Elsevier uses XML and SGML as the backbone of its publishing operations?

JABIN WHITE: "With the tight schedules we have, and with the volatility in the market, there's no way to predict ahead of time what people are going to need in terms of output format. XML allows us to be ready for anything. The majority of our revenues still come from print, but we also output to the web and other formats. For example, handheld devices are the big up-and-comer in our market. All these mediums have different output requirements and require different formats. So XML is the best solution."

DCL-NEWS: Is all your content in XML or SGML?

JABIN WHITE: "A hundred percent of our journal content is in SGML, moving to XML. I can say that without a hint of arrogance because I had nothing to do with it - Elsevier Science made a commitment to that before I joined the organization, and did a great job with it. We're now moving towards doing the same with our book content. We view it as pretty important right now, but critical in the future."

DCL-NEWS: Is this because of the burgeoning use of handhelds?

JABIN WHITE: "In part, because that demand is here today. But what's the next big thing past that? I certainly don't know, and even the experts don't necessarily agree on that. Bottom line is that we need the flexibility to output to an ever-increasing variety of formats, based on changing customer needs. And we need to do this in a timely and cost-efficient manner. In handhelds, for example, there's no single operating system that is dominant in the market. You've got Palm, Pocket PC, and other smaller operating systems. That makes it very difficult to keep pace with the rate of change; and is the reason why we're embracing the Open eBook standard, which is an implementation of XML. It allows us to deploy our journal and book content to handheld formats without committing to one platform - which is the whole beauty of XML."

DCL-NEWS: How far have you gotten with making your content available for handhelds?

JABIN WHITE: At present, we're taking existing book content and reworking it for handhelds. However, this current solution, given the size of the Elsevier Science assets, is not scalable in terms of cost and schedule efficiency. Using XML standards like OEB and some process re-engineering, we plan to start from the beginning and prepare content for the handheld market at the same time as we prepare it for print.

DCL-NEWS: Do you see print becoming redundant?

JABIN WHITE: First of all, no way. Second of all, it shouldn't matter. Print is still our #1 revenue driver. The challenge is to create production processes that allow output of content that is easily published in whatever format we want, or more importantly, whatever format our customers want.

DCL-NEWS: Is this a big change?

JABIN WHITE: Yes. From the outside it might look subtle. But it's a huge change for us internally in the way that we, as traditional medical publishers, think about content. Copy, acquisition, and developmental editors, for example, all have new tools to work with and new ways to think about content. They have the very tough job of considering whether a given chunk of text will be for the printed page, as a piece of a website, as a section on a handheld device, or all three! Traditionally, we didn't need to think in those terms. And the simple truth is that just because the technology allows for this now doesn't mean that people automatically think this way.

DCL-NEWS: What does the future hold from a sales perspective?

JABIN WHITE: Obviously, we see growth potential in the area of electronic products. By definition, they allow us to provide service to our customers that were impossible to deliver on the printed page. Ideally, we will be able to offer solutions to customers in whatever delivery medium they prefer. And XML is the most powerful tool to both get us there and enable us to be a major player.

DCL-NEWS: What are the benefits of using XML today?

JABIN WHITE: Aside from anything else we have discussed, given the shear amount of content that makes up the Elsevier Science holdings, a tool like XML is imperative. For us, it is a practical impossibility in terms of cost and schedule to transform content multiple times for multiple outputs. XML is our solution in order to continue to meet customer expectations and manage costs. I personally would be scared to consider the future without XML. Apart from anything else, it would be a nightmarish prospect to convert all our data to fit the wide variety of output requirements.

Finally and most importantly, XML helps you realize your plans for the future. The big cliche about XML is that it is media neutral, but cliches are cliches because they are usually true. Everything else in the history of information publishing has been output-specific, be it typesetting languages or word processing programs. You decided on an output format and that was that, everything that you did was specific to that output format. With XML you are able to make decisions independent of and not based on any output format - and that's a pretty powerful thing.

NEXT MONTH we interview another leading figure in the world of XML and STM publishing - don't miss it!

DCLnews Editorial

Click here to read last month's expert STM/XML interview with Bill Kasdorf of Impressions Book & Journal Services.

Read more XML related articles at DCL Library

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