Oh Really! 5 Questions With...

[Carter Glass]

by Jeff Wood

Mar 2005

In each issue, this section presents an interview with someone in the field of content management. In this issue we interview Carter Glass from American Geophysical Union to learn more about its editorial and production processes.

Name:	Carter Glass
Company:	American Geophysical Union
Title:	Manager, Electronic Publications Systems Development
Brief Bio:	Carter is the Manager of Electronic Publishing Development at the American Geophysical Union. His mission is to build tools to help scientists collaborate in research and publish their results. Carter has been building database systems for more than 15 years and was drawn to on-line publishing because it has the most interesting challenges in the years ahead.

[1] What are the kinds of products that American Geophysical Union (AGU) publishes?

Carter: We publish scientific journals, books, and a weekly newspaper.

[2] Can you describe the editorial and production processes currently in place for publishing journals?

Carter: Authors submit manuscripts electronically in popular word processing formats. Peer-review and copy editing are all performed electronically. After peer-review and copy editing, the manuscripts are converted to XML. The XML is used to produce the HTML and PDF representations, and the XML metadata is used to populate a relational database. From the database, AGU is able to provide daily Crossref deposits, data feeds to other primary and secondary publishers, and management reporting. The database is also used to produce many year-end products such as tables of contents, subject and author indexes. It also provides a simple mechanism for internal (AGU to AGU) reference linking. Soon the database will be used to provide external linking and forward citations.

[3] What was the process like prior to the standardization of XML in the process, and what were some of the business drivers that necessitated the change?

Carter: Prior to electronic production, AGU relied primarily on author-produced camera ready copy. We moved to electronic publishing for several reasons. First, our author community wanted to publish their results in new and exciting ways. Second, we wanted to provide new electronic-only products such as cross journal collections, improved information discovery, and work more efficiently with primary and secondary publishers.

[4] What were some of the major hurdles you needed to overcome, both organizationally and technologically, to achieve your goals?

Carter: Our move to electronic publishing required a significant technology investment as well as major staff and organizational changes. What used to be a simple editorial process suddenly required an understanding of XML tagging, metadata business rules, computer generated art and new automated production processes. This required our staff and management to learn new skills. We also invested a significant amount of money in database technology, DTD construction, software engineering and new services from our various vendors.

The payoff however has been immense. Electronic publication allows us to perform "just-in-time" publication. Articles are posted each publication day; authors no longer need to wait for a printed issue to have their article read or cited. Providing our various data to other publishers and A&I services is now a completely automated process, and previously labor-intensive manual processes, such as generating year-end indexes, have been completely automated. An electronic workflow has also resulted in an increased amount of publication. We are able to publish more articles, faster, with fewer mistakes and at a lower cost.

[5] Are there any future initiatives to either modify the current journal process, or expand the model to include some of the other AGU products?

Carter: Yes, we are moving to bring our books and newspaper into the same electronic workflow and delivery as our journal publications. We will be using our electronic production environment to provide RSS data feeds and other alerting services.