heiPUBLISHING – The Heidelberg XML Publishing Workflow

The heiPUBLISHING journal workflow enables external editorial teams to independently carry out the editorial processes from article planning to electronic publication. A browser-based Gitlab folder system serves as the central interface between the external editorial team and the publication infrastructure of the University Library of Heidelberg. The Gitlab interface is used to convert contributions in Microsoft Word or Open Office file formats to JATS XML and to trigger and control the (optional) generation of laid-out PDFs. External editorial teams work directly in the XML files generated in this way. The XML files generated in Gitlab are edited and corrected using the commercial XML editor Oxygen, which, if not already available, must be licensed by the editorial team. Once the contribution files – XML, media files and the optional PDF – are ready for publication, the editorial team uploads them to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) editorial system, adds metadata and finally publishes them. A static HTML version is not generated. Our in-house development heiVIEWER dynamically generates an individually customisable HTML reading environment with the article content based on the XML file published in OJS when the reader accesses the article.

Editorial staff are trained by the Publication Services team at Heidelberg University Library and supported in case of questions and problems. Setting up a journal also includes creating an individual layout template for generating formatted PDFs and creating a coding manual for XML creation.

The heiPUBLISHING book workflow is a BITS-XML-based, media-neutral publication process for scientific publications (monographs, anthologies and dictionaries/encyclopaedias). The manuscripts are converted using the open-source converter meTypeset. The page description language XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) is used in conjunction with the commercial formatter AntennaHouse Formatter for the (optional) generation of professionally laid-out PDFs. It is possible to generate standardised PDF/A and PDF/X files.