An introduction to collectivepublishing

June 3, 2014

Author: Pedro Correia

1 Abstract

Web-based communication technologies become awidely available and recognizable tool these days.It is now common knowledge to know how to usee-mail, instant messaging, blogs, and social net-works, among others. Socially this represents anever increasing ability to communicate both withina group and external to it. However, from theauthor point of view, some old technologies stillhave not have found their way into mass availabil-ity. One common example is journals or maga-zines. Usually to undertake such an enterprise onewould need authors, editors, image designers, lay-out designers as well many other specialized areas.Evidently the level of proficiency for a magazinenowadays is very high and the final product com-plex. Nevertheless the tolerance for products ofless quality (visual or literary) has also increasedas can be seen by the emergence of blogs. Mostare simple compositions of text and image and thequality of the blog is mostly decided by the abilityof the authors. In fact, although some people seemto be more talented in communicating their ideas,experience does count and, usually, the more one

writes the better one does it. Considering the cur-rent state of communication technology this articlehopes to expose a new concept, henceforth called”collective publishing”, which allows users to cre-ate their own journals and magazines without theneed for sophisticated and highly proficient teamsand software.

2 What is collective publish-ing?

Although the main purpose of a journal or mag-azine is to expose authored contents the path toreach a final document is complex. The size of thetext, the ratio between text and images, the layoutare only some of the factors that make it such alayered endeavor and none of it deals directly withthe quality of the article. I say directly becausethe visual presentation is important for the readerscomfort. However should one attempt at mimickingthis procedure and one would come to the conclu-sion that it would be difficult task. The figure be-low shows the simple diagram of some fundamentalstages to build a well-designed magazine article.

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For the common user this would be enough toprevent him from ever trying. If we base the currentproficiency level of a user by already common expe-riences like blogging we can observe that any tasks,either than any simple formatting (like contents se-quence) and the actual writing, are prohibitive fora regular contribution. It just would take too muchtime. For this reason many of the different stagesto go on such an endeavor should be mostly au-tomatic. The diagram from the figure below ex-presses the idea that by removing stages from userresponsibility decreases the number of people (ortime) necessary to achieve the intended result.

Evidently this means that something must be do-ing the remaining stages to achieve a final article.We’ll get to that later. For now let’s assume the ex-istence of such technology. This means that a groupof people, henceforth called collaborators, decideto make a journal. This means that each one ofthose collaborators is a possible author. They’renot obliged to write articles but there’s a possibil-

ity that they’ll do just that. That said no matterwho is going to author the articles of the journal, allof the collaborators are readers. Should the groupdecide the journal is published on a weekly basis,than in some week’s collaborator A does not con-tribute with an article, in other weeks the samecollaborator contributes with one or several arti-cles. In fact there’s really no need for the journalto be published on specific dates. The criteria forpublishing could be just the availability of articles.Every time a number is reached the journal is pub-lished. No matter the criteria for publishing eachof the collaborators should have access to a toolthat allows them to easily write an article. Let’stake it like a fact. Each collaborator of a collectivejournal has an application to write articles, hence-forth called ”Article Maker”. In that applicationthey have a submit button. The submit buttonsends the written article to an internet server like amail account. Another collaborator responsible foractually publishing the journal has another applica-tion called ”Publisher”. ”Publisher” has a buttonthat searches for submitted articles in the serverfor a given time range. From that search the col-laborator with the publishing software can selectthe articles to include or exclude from the journal(because some may be mistakes or even spam) andonce this is done compile all articles into a journalwhich will then be sent to all collaborators. Thefigure below shows just that. From the 9 collabo-rators only 4 contributed with an article (authors)but all of them receive the journal. We’ve calledthis concept ”collective publishing”.

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3 Available technology

The tools previously designated by ”Article Maker”and ”Publisher” do not need to be hard-drive soft-ware. They could work directly on a web site. Alsothe result product from the collective publishingcan be a printable pdf, a web page, or any otherreproducible technology. However the software de-veloped to test and research this subject is hard-drive based and uses a mail account as server. Thismeans that each collaborator has a software called”Article Maker” that submits an article directly tothe mail account of the journal. Another collabora-tor (or the same) has a software called ”Publisher”from which it can search for submitted articles andauthorize the production of the journal. The figurebelow shows an example of an application to writearticles.

Notice that in these early tests the user can choseonly a few basic types of contents to use in its ar-ticles. These are title, text and images. They’reimportant because stating that a sentence is a ti-tle makes a difference when building a ”Contents”area for the journal (which, notice, it should beautomatic). Also by stating that certain content isan image enables the software to perform the neces-sary transformations for the image to be adequateto the journal template. Instead of the continuousdocument a user is used to in a normal documentprocessing tool, ”Article Maker” relies on modules(title, text and image). This simple way of organiz-ing a document (a chain of contents) may have sev-eral features that promote a better article. First itstimulates the user to be objective meaning for ex-

ample that ”the text module I’m writing now mustbe adequate to the title I’ve put in the previousmodule and the image I’m putting in the poste-rior module”. Second the number of modules canbe limited stimulating the user to make good useof the number of contents it can put in its article.Last but not least this form of organizing a docu-ment simplifies greatly the task of doing automaticformatting. Because the publishing software knowsdirectly what a title is, what is a text, what is animage, and how the user has organized them it candirectly build a final document that can organize anindex, place the correct author name and picture inthe correct articles, and present them as originallyintended by the author. For our test software TeXtechnology was chosen to handle the formatting.The results are beautifully formatted documentswhich, although have some problems due to nothaving any human intervention, are mostly coher-ent and well within a user tolerance for aesthetics.In fact the document you are reading right now wasproduced using our ”Article Maker”. But beforeproceeding with the technology used to build thetools for these tests let’s take a look for an examplelayout for the ”Publisher” in the figure below.

While using the ”Publisher” the user sees a cal-endar where it can put a time range and searchbutton. Once this button is pressed the severalavailable articles in the mail box (previously con-figured) appear on the ”Publisher” inbox. The userselects which articles should enter the journal. Bypressing the create button a journal will be com-piled. Finally by pressing the publish button thejournal is sent to all collaborators (there’s a list of

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email addresses inside the software). The user withthe ”Publisher” can also make some other choiceslike the name of the journal and subtitle (for ex-ample the number of that same journal), as well asthe cover picture. For the test versions the journal(and article) templates are not very editable. Bydefault the journal is organized in two columns (ex-cept on cover page) in which first appear the ”Con-tents” (titles and subtitles of articles), secondly thearticles by order of submission. For each of the ar-ticles the main title appears followed by the pictureand name of the authors (and then followed by allthe other contents of the article). Python was thelanguage used to develop both software (”ArticleMaker” and ”Publisher”), and the portable distri-bution of MIKTeX (since it can’t be guaranteed theauthors will have MIKTeX installed on their com-puters) used to compile the article modules into apdf article or journal.

4 Early tests

The reason why I’ve developed the concept of ”col-lective publishing” was to solve a very real prob-lem in the research center I’m currently workingon: CERENA (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon- Portugal). CERENA has many different sectionsspecialized in many different areas (chemistry, geo-physics, geo-informatics, environment, oil reservoirengineering, and so on) although working for thesame purpose of researching the sustainable use ofnatural resources as well as their impact on theenvironment. The problem here is organization.Currently CERENA has more than 100 researchersworking with different technologies and methodolo-gies. These are mostly unknown to their pears dueto difficulties in crossing information. Also, sincethere is a limit of productivity CERENA can han-dle, there are many ideas that are being lost and notdocumented for posterior considerations. Severalseminars were schedule (at least once a month) forresearchers to present their works. Unfortunatelydue to the size of CERENA the year schedule ofseminars is quickly depleted and most researchershave only one chance (if any) to present their worksin several years. This does not promote experiencein communicating to others and some presentations

are flat and fail to stimulate the audience. The re-sult tends to be mostly empty rooms. By the timeseminars started a newsletter was also introduced.The newsletter does allow users to post simple mes-sages about specific subjects but once again is verylimited in size and should a great number of personspost on the newsletter and it would become com-pletely unreadable. Also not having the chance toillustrate a concept with an image makes this doc-ument a dull one. A few months ago I’ve started towonder if it would be possible to use the commonconcept of journal and magazine to a level that anyperson could do it. I have some experience in soft-ware development, mainly using python, includinggraphical user interfaces so I knew I could build aworkable and comfortable tool for users. The thingI didn’t know how to do (or had very little expe-rience) was internet communication, like puttingsoftware communicating with a mail account, anddocument processing. The internet communicationpart was easy enough, fortunately Python has afew libraries that simplify the majority of opera-tions required to put the concept working. Thedocument formatting was another story. I’ve triedseveral packages including matplotlib and reportlab(both python libraries) to build my own templatesfor documents but the results were always unpre-dictable. At the time I’ve knew the existence ofLaTeX for many years but never tried to use it.I’ve made some simple experiments with it, tough,and it worked. The documents came out prettyand organized. The major problem with LaTeXwas that it needed to be installed for it to work.If only one computer needed to have (the ”Pub-lisher” computer) was one thing but I wanted it forthe users of ”Article Maker” to have the chance tosee their articles before submitting. I’ve searchedand found a portable LaTeX package for windows.With some tweaking it worked (although quite bigin size) and I’ve started distributing the softwarefor several people. I’ve also started thinking thatthe document compiling could be server based butthat would require too much effort from the userpoint of view (from my perspective) so I remainedwith my initial concept that the software does it all.I’ve designed the ”Article Maker” to be very intu-itive with several ideas from ”Instant messaging”software. I wanted the author to have the feelingthat it can write informally.

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5 Review

Perhaps due to my inexperience in promoting newideas I found that it was very difficult to introduceand implement such a new concept. I’ve distributeit by less than 10 people and I’ve received somesparse reviews (positive reviews actually) but mostdidn’t even tried it. I’ve been trying to analyzewhat failed and come to the conclusion that forsomething like this to work it needs to be a groupdecision and I’ve been trying to push people justto test it which is mostly seen as something whichis not fun. Also I believe it’s important for a po-tential user to be presented with what might beachieved with simple contributions. Right now I’mjust making new adjustments to both the conceptand the software as I become more experienced inthe field. Unfortunately I still lack a fully func-tional case study in order to test the current con-cept and consequently improve it.

6 For the reader

If by any chance you would like to try out this con-cept in a group you belong to please let us know inanteiamedialab[at]gmail.com. Our software is freeand open-source and we’ll tell you how to put it towork. Notice, however, that we are in early testsand some bugs may appear. Nevertheless we areinterested to know how you and your group haveexperienced the concept and if you feel that it helpsyou. We are also interested in any suggestions youmay have. If you have any questions feel free tocontact us.

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