INSIGHT INTO XML

The Power of XML
Bill Kasdorf of Impressions Book & Journal Services reveals how XML has turned fierce publishing competitors into creative collaborators

BILL KASDORF (pictured) is president and owner of Impressions Book and Journal Services, a composition and publishing services firm that specializes in XML and designs, edits, and produces books and journals in print and electronic forms. Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, he is a regular speaker and seminar leader for SSP, as well as for other publishing-industry organizations such as the Association of American University Presses, the Council of Science Editors, and Seybold Seminars.

DCLnews caught up with him during a break between speaking engagements and asked why STM publishers should be embracing XML?

"The majority of them already are and those who aren't should be! In fact, the STM publishers leading the XML charge are producing some of the most sophisticated XML around today. They're also establishing much of the foundation for things that other sectors of publishing - particularly book publishing - are following."

DCL-NEWS: STM publishers were early adopters of SGML too...

BILL KASDORF: "Absolutely. They were right out in front with SGML. The Majour initiative, back in the 1980s, for example, was a collaborative effort by the big STM publishers to create an SGML DTD (Document Type Definition) for scientific journals. It involved publishers like Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell, and Wiley, among others. Because these publishers dominated the marketplace, they thought that if they agreed on a standard DTD then all other STM publishers would be forced to follow it. Well... they did define a header, which is the bibliographic information at the beginning of a paper... but they never managed to completely agree on the body tagging, mainly because they all had different approaches. The Majour initiative didn't succeed. But it was an attempt at collaboration between organizations that are fierce competitors. So it was very positive in that respect. And it led to the environment we are in today, where competitors are collaborating more and more."

DCL-NEWS: CrossRef, the not-for-profit reference linking service, being a prime example...

BILL KASDORF: "Exactly. Many of those same publishers got together and said: We need to have a way to link to each other's journals, let's set something up that's publisher neutral and non-profit. So they set up CrossRef. The fact that they did it is a milestone achievement. To have that many major competitors cooperate to create something so constructive and effective is pretty much a first."

DCL-NEWS: Why do you think CrossRef has proved so popular in the STM world - after all, fierce competitors don't suddenly turn altruistic without good commercial reason?

BILL KASDORF: "You've got a point there! One reason is pressure from users. Scientists and researchers simply demand the easy interchange of their material and the ability to link to each other. Frankly, if those publishers hadn't come up with a solution, they'd have been in big trouble.

In the past, academics who wished to share their research had only one option - they published their findings in a journal. That was the only way to get their work known in the wider academic community. But that's no longer the case. In the sciences, for example, there are pre-print servers, like the famous one that Ginsparg set up in high-energy physics. And with the Internet, researchers can freely exchange their research, bypassing publishing companies. Publishers have no choice but to pay attention to all this and work out where they add value in the services they offer."

DCL-NEWS: Another thing that will affect publishing houses is the publishing initiatives being set up by libraries. Could you tell us a little about them?

BILL KASDORF: "The two that I think are most interesting are the SPARC initiative, where a group of libraries have banded together to develop publishing without commercial publishers, and HighWire, which came out of the Stanford University Library. HighWire might not be a primary publisher, but they are a major force in how material gets delivered electronically. Which, again, is something the commercial publishers have been forced to wake up to - as most of them now have."   

DCL-NEWS: Do you see a time when electronic formats will replace print in STM publishing?

BILL KASDORF: "There are cases now in STM - particularly on the journal side - where electronic revenues are increasing dramatically and print revenues are declining. In some cases, that line has already been crossed and electronic publishing is more profitable than print. That is clearly the environment where the electronic will ultimately replace print. But right now many publishers are burdened with having to do both.

In the long run, it makes sense to publish academic journals electronically - even if the intention is for them to get printed remotely. For example, a scientific journal could be delivered in PDF and printed out article by article. That way you don't have to bind several thousand copies of a journal in a central plant and mail them around the world, which takes weeks or more. Publishing electronically allows you to publish a lot faster and takes a good deal of the cost out of the process."

DCL-NEWS: Distributing content to handheld devices looks set to be the next big thing?

BILL KASDORF: "We just did a project called the American Joint Commission on Cancer. It's basically a clinical cancer reference and is published in three modes simultaneously: As an 8.5 by 11, two color, two column manual, which is the main publication; as a pocket-sized handbook; and electronically for the Palm Pilot OS. Of course, XML is what enables this to happen. We created one master XML file and from that file all three separate presentations were generated.

One interesting thing about this project is we did what we call embedded indexing. In other words, we were able to embed the index information with the XML. This meant we could automatically generate the index for each new format as it was re-paginated. Traditionally you would have to typeset the reference book and then re-index it to find where the page numbers have shifted to. But if the indexing is embedded into the XML, the whole thing is automatic. All in all, it's another example of the sheer power of XML."

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 Debbie Lapeyre, Vice President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc

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