| | Development |
Openly Informatics, Inc., is involved in a variety of development projects related to information infrastructure.
Hyperlinks get you from one place to another on the internet. We see a large opportunity for companies that can get in the middle of hyperlinks and add value to them.
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Businesses need be driven to meet customers needs and expectations. The reason that subscription based content has fared so poorly on the internet has been the necessity to impose access controls. How many passwords have you forgotten? Access controls insert overt distrust into the relationships between producers and consumers of premium information.
We believe that friendly methods of controlling customer access will make customer relationships much more valuable in the near future. We call the system "iCredentials" to emphasize the the positive nature of subscriber relationships.
What does "Infrastructure for 21st Century Publishing" mean for Scholarly Publishing?
The combination of the Internet, the exponentially increasing power of personal computers, and the mind-boggling sophistication of mass-market software is making new things possible in the scholarly publishing business. In particular, emerging document standards such as XML could eventually make it possible to eliminate 90% of the cost of producing a scholarly publication.
When that happens, several things could occur
Some unpleasant things that could happen can be avoided. Each journal might develop a different format or submission template, putting new burdens on authors. Publishers might make it difficult to follow citations to works from other publishers. The business models adopted by the on-line journals may impose such onerous restrictions of access that the utility of the journal is compromised. You might even have to memorize a different password for every journal you want to read!
Openly Informatics participated in the development of eFirst XML, one of the first efforts to define a high-functionality pure-XML format for scholarly journal articles. Openly has made all the supporting documents freely available for others to build on.
XML will be the basis for a deeply rooted change in the way scholars communicate.
Today, software is a big expense for internet scholarly publishing. Software has a large cost for the first copy, but the costs of subsequent copies can be rather small. So if many journals use the same software, the costs can be reduced dramatically.
Openly Informatics assists the Materials Research Society in the operation and management of one of the most innovative pure-internet e-journals in existence, The MRS Internet Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research. This journal uses agressive automation and SGML techniques to cut operating costs dramatically compared to traditionally produced journals. At the same time, it has deployed eFirst XML technology to ensure the lasting utility and archivability of its published papers.
The approach taken in this project has been to use mass-market software applications such as Microsoft Word, Quark Xpress, Adobe Acrobat, Qualcomm Eudora and Filemaker Pro as the building blocks for the full solution. Languages such as Java, Visual Basic, and Applescript have be used to stitch together the various applications and automate everything.