The expression
Single Source Publishing refers to
generating several formats from a single source. One and unique
source can be used to produce various artifacts, without having to
switch from one working progress to another. With a Single Source
Publishing approach it’s possible to produce a PDF format for
printing, an XML export for a digital platform or a digital version in
HTML format, just with one source.
What is this source
? A set of texts, some metadata,
some bibliographical data, perhaps some images and other medias.
Perhaps you already use the principles of Single Source Publishing:
it’s long and tedious with a classic word processor, it’s a little bit
complex with LaTeX, it’s expensive and it’s not easy with XML, and
it’s very powerful and more accessible with tools like Pandoc.
This editorial challenge brings up both
theoretical and technical questions, such as the legitimization of
content, the evolution of publishing practices, and the creation of
adequate tools.
Scientific publishing has several constraints:
-
critical material: footnotes, citations, bibliographies, figures, insert, etc. -
metadata: data about data, like title, subtitle, authors, standard identifiers (ORCID, Wikidata, etc.) -
text structuration: semantic is a necessity for digital diffusion (especially in XML) -
bibliographic data: structured references -
peer review: a complex circulation and validation for the texts -
specific formats: articles, books, conference proceedings, etc. -
publish or perish: publish a lot but slowly
In: with non-standard formats like
Out: scientific publishing
requires specific formats: PDF, HTML, and various XML with specific
schemas (like JATS or TEI).
-
one source: no need to manage multiple versions, like the.doc version, the.xml version and the.indd version -
horizontal workflow: all actors of the publishing chain can participate at the same time (in theory). Writers, publishers, designers and digital distributors can work at the same time -
multimodal: one source but multiple artifacts/formats -
time and energy saving -
work in progress: building a publishing chain can be a work in progress
If the publishing chain can be horizontal, how can we do the legitimization of the content? How to deal with the validation of content, the structuration and the design of the document?
-
no more word processing (or much more less)
-
more tech in publishing staff (but less complexity)
-
publishers build their own publishing chain by assembling free programs/software
-
publishing workflows can be fun!
Since the 1980’s, scientific community use one and unique tool for writing and editing: different generations of word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer or Google Docs. Proprietary, copycat of proprietary software or centralised, they maintain a confusion between the structure of the contents and the graphic rendering.
The academic community needs tools
that correspond to its constraints! And it’s what a lot of
people do, with an approach more or less compatible with the Single
Source Publishing: Manifold, PubPubPub, Coko, Métopes, Quire, Stylo,
etc.
With Single Source Publishing come some interesting concepts:
From Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan, 1965): the hybridity of the media generates new media: the media have an effect on each other. In the same way, it is interesting to take into account the influence of various formats on their unique source.
From Alessandro Ludovico (Ludovico & Cramer, 2012): the hybridization of forms and formats is a phenomenon that can be observed in the first digital experiments: electronic versions come to complete already existing forms, printed and digital artifacts become hybrid.
From Marcello Vitali-Rosati (Vitali-Rosati, 2016): editorialization is the set of dynamics that produce and structure digital space. The adaptation of publishing chains to produce different artifacts is one way of understanding and constructing this space.
In the Revue2.0 project
(revue20.org) lead by the
Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities, several journals have
experimented Single Source Publishing with Stylo (a semantic editor
for academic writing and publishing). With one source (a set of text,
metadata, bibliographic data), scientific journals are able to produce
the following formats: HTML for their website, PDF for their own
distribution and for aggregators, and XML formats for digital
distributors.
Stylo is a tool designed to
transform the digital workflow of scholarly journals in humanities and
social sciences. As a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) semantic
text editor for the humanities, it aims to improve the academic
publishing chain. Stylo is ready and free to use:
stylo.huma-num.fr.
Blanc, J., & Haute, L.
(2018). Technologies de l’édition numérique.
Sciences du design,
8(2), 11–17.
Hyde, A. (2021). Single Source
Publishing. In Coko.
Ludovico, A., & Cramer,
F. (2012). Post-digital print: the
mutation of publishing since 1894. Onomatopee.
Maxwell, J. W. (2019).
Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of
Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms. The MIT Press.
McLuhan, M. (1965).
Understanding media: the extensions of
man. McGraw-Hill.
Vitali-Rosati, M. (2016). What
is editorialization ? Sens
Public.