Microsoft for scholars from CHE (scrubbed)

["Okerson, Ann" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Of possible wide interest.  Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher 
Education.

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Microsoft Rolls Out Publishing and Research Tools for Academics

By PETER MONAGHAN

Redmond, Wash.

Saying it wants to help scholars and publishers write, edit, and 
publish academic articles, this week Microsoft Corporation rolled 
out a set of new software tools to perform those tasks, as well 
as to navigate thorny copyright issues and find and share 
scholarly data.

The tools are add-ons to popular programs such as Microsoft 
Office Word. The move is clearly designed to extend the company's 
reach into new forms of academic publishing, and Microsoft made 
its announcement here at the ninth annual Microsoft Research 
Faculty Summit, which was attended by about 400 researchers and 
technology officials from research universities.

For example, the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables 
authors to structure and annotate their documents according to 
formats that publishers and digital archives require. The 
articles can then be converted easily to formats that facilitate 
their digital storage and preservation. The company is offering 
the new software free to licensed users of Word and other 
Microsoft products.

The tool allows users to create documents in the widely used 
format developed by the National Library of Medicine's free 
digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life-sciences 
journal literature, PubMed Central. But users will also be able 
to shape the software to suit other formats because the code for 
the tool is openly accessible and freely adaptable.

The products, initially aimed at scientists, also seek to make it 
easier for authors and editors to electronically embed into 
papers details about the research process and its results, such 
as bibliographies and key phrases. The goal, Microsoft officials 
said, is to help readers who conduct searches in electronic 
databases find relevant articles more easily.

The new tools will enable a more dynamic way of discovering and 
exploring links within enormous and hard-to-search bodies of 
research, the officials said.

"We've never before addressed what we could put around Office, 
Excel, SharePoint, and our other programs to make them more 
useful for science," said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of 
Microsoft's external-research division. "For example, Word was 
not tailored for scientific papers. But we decided to see, Can we 
make it more useful in that way?"

He said the company is also responding to the demand for 
researchers to provide greater access to their findings, and even 
their research data. Already the National Institutes of Health 
requires that any publications from research it finances be 
placed in PubMed Central within one year of publication. The 
National Science Foundation has a similar requirement, as do 
Harvard University's faculties of law and of arts and sciences.

Such developments have increasingly raised concerns about 
copyrights and fair reuse of archived materials. So to help 
authors, publishers, and databases embed information about 
copyrights and licenses in Microsoft Office documents, the 
company released another free product, called the Creative 
Commons Add-in for Office 2007.

The company's motivation, said Lee Dirks, director of scholarly 
communications for the Technical Computing Initiative at 
Microsoft, is to increase the appeal of its existing software 
packages and also to secure a role in the way academics work with 
technology companies in the academic publishing world of the 
future. "We're going to academics to find what the community 
standards are that we can map to," he said.

To that end, Microsoft has developed other new tools, now in 
testing, such as one that helps institutions build digital 
repositories for research output. The company has also set up an 
"e-journal service" that aids in self-publishing of online-only 
journals and other documents, such as conference proceedings. And 
its Research Information Centre, developed with the British 
Library, helps researchers collaborate throughout a project, from 
seeking money to collecting information and managing data and 
research papers.

Mr. Hey says he believes that Microsoft's business goals and 
academe's needs are in harmony when it comes to research and 
publishing. Scholarly institutions will happily pay fees, he 
said, to have companies like his provide products that relieve 
universities and their faculty members of tasks like managing 
large databases. After all, he said, scholars are more interested 
in doing actual research. Mr. Hey, who directed Britain's 
national e-Science Programme from 2001 to 2005, said that during 
recent decades he had seen "generations of research scientists 
sacrificed to being the computer-science techie for their group."

Copyright 2008 The Chronicle of Higher Education