FIGARO – European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway

Citation

(2003), "FIGARO – European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2003.12231aab.019

FIGARO – European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway

FIGARO – European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway

A collective of European universities and publishers have announced the establishment of FIGARO, an academic publishing project that will create a European network of institutions providing e-publishing support to the European academic community. FIGARO will investigate new business models for scholarly publishing and will stimulate open access to the publications produced and distributed with its infrastructure, making scholarly publishing faster, cheaper and simpler.

FIGARO plans to develop their network further to offer the critical mass needed to continue expansion into a digital e-publishing platform. The project will support and promote the development of such a platform by offering its European participants a technical infrastructure and a network organisation strategy that facilitates the entire digital publishing process. In this way, participants will benefit from each other's technological, organisational and scientific knowledge.

FIGARO's business model is based on a federative approach consisting of a back office that supports the network of individual publishing instances (front offices). The name FIGARO merely represents the brand of the facilitating organisation, allowing the brand and identity of the various content providers to take centre stage. Publishers can profit from the European network, which facilitates such things as peer reviews, communication with authors and the exchange of publications. This will help them limit the costs without compromising quality and will prevent them from having to surrender their identity.

Technical solutions enhancing the FIGARO co-operation model include support for standard document models expressed in XML and related authoring tools, the shared use of a WWW-based workflow steering engine, support for generic authentication and authorization methods and for heterogeneous, distributed content management functions including persistent pointing technologies and printing on demand services. While some of these components will be developed as part of the FIGARO project work, most of them will be based on standard and mostly open source WWW-technology; the bulk of the work in this area will be concerned with integration rather than development.

FIGARO has already attracted significant support. The Information Society Directorate-General of the European Union has granted an EUR 1.4 million subsidy for the project, which began in May 2002 and will continue until October 2004. The current project participants include universities in The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Belgium, various commercial ICT and publishing companies and SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

SPARC responded with a less than enthusiastic assessment: "Inspired by the notion of 'returning science to scientists', the group has fleshed out ambitious plans to deliver a publication platform by the end of 2004 in the face of formidable risks. Among them: with just $1.1 million in seed money, plus diverse and greatly dispersed partners, financing will nip at the project's heels. Partners will have to contribute cash, labor or in-kind services, and that will require sensitive negotiating and full and open communications. Another major risk is one shared by most revolutionary innovations: it's never been done before. And with no preparatory market research (but a confident knowledge that authors are dissatisfied with the current system) partners know that, once launched, FIGARO cannot waste time proving its worth. It must develop a reputation for quick-turn-around publishing. And it must develop a sterling reputation, upon which authors can build their own reputations.

For more information contact Natalia Grygierczyk, University of Utrecht Library. Tel: +31 30 253 6516; E-mail: N.Grygierczyk@library.uu.nl; Web site: www.figaro-europe.net

Source: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, 1 October 2002.