> their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats
Publication workflow, formatting and accessibility? For every paper I’ve done I just send the ACM a final PDF produced myself from a LaTeX template that hasn’t changed in years. What’s the workflow for taking an already final PDF from authors and uploading it to a file server?
- Brand new templates (introduced about 5 years ago, the LaTeX template has had multiple updates per year since then)
- Workflow that makes use of the source (or possibly codes the source embeds in the PDF, but you have to provide LaTeX source to ACM these days)
- Papers now render in both PDF and HTML (and the HTML looks quite good), this started showing up within the last 1-2 years
- Papers are archived in an XML-based format (something called JITS, I do not know details) to facilitate rendering to PDF, HTML, ePub, and other formats not yet devised
That doesn't seem too impressive. It's essentially a workflow that a few universities could band together and replicate via an open source project relatively easily IMHO.
As an example, Pandoc can already handle 90% of this type of workflow by itself (converting Latex to various XML formats). An open source project shared among a few universities or developed by single body like the ACM and used among dozen's of publications and fields. Even two or three full time people working on this would cost much less than $1M per year.
That sounds pretty counterproductive. So now authors, in addition to keeping up on their research, need to keep up on the updates to the ACM's LaTeX stylesheet? And there's every chance that the version that is formatted well with the ACM stylesheet when you initially submit will have formatting bugs six months later because the template got updated? And now you have a whole new toolchain to debug when the HTML version of your paper misaligns your tables? And maybe the HTML version that looks fine today will get mangled in 2028 after you retire and they update the CSS, as has happened with most of the New York Times articles?
It sounds like the ACM has a really different set of priorities than libraries and researchers do, one that values increasing headcount over guaranteeing permanence.
I'm not sure how it works at ACM, but often, it's people retyping the contents of your article into a JATS-XML template and adding additional metadata (authors, date of publication, perhaps who funded it, etc.), which is then used to generate several outputs (e.g. PDF, HTML, but also citation lists, etc.).
>The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an XML format used to describe scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National Standards Institute with the code Z39.96-2012.
Publication workflow, formatting and accessibility? For every paper I’ve done I just send the ACM a final PDF produced myself from a LaTeX template that hasn’t changed in years. What’s the workflow for taking an already final PDF from authors and uploading it to a file server?