SCOPE
An XML Based Publishing Platform
Zentraleinrichtung Computer- und Medienservice (Rechenzentrum)
One of the objectives of the Open Access movement is to establish institutional repositories at universities and other research institutions in order to support selfarchiving. While a lot of software solutions have already been presented in recent years they lack a seamless integration of authoring tools, support for authors, and other technical publishing tools. This paper presents SCOPE (Servic e Core for open Publishing Environments) – an integrated publishing platform which facilita tes distributed electronic publishing on a central repository. This platform targets to extend the services provided by the edoc server of Humboldt University (http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/), and to support both, editors and authors during the creation phase of scholarly publications. Coinstantaneously, SCOPE focuses on XML based publishing technologies – especially on XML as the basic document format. To represent the basis of publishing processes, so called publication components (authoring tools, document models, conversion and transformation tools, styles, etc.) have been defined. Being developed for a variety of different publication series, these atomic modules, their versions, properties, and interdependencies are managed by a component management system. This syste m rests upon a formal application model and enables abstract specifica tions of the technological parts of publishing processes. Based upon this management system the second layer of SCOPE comes into function. It allows editors to access the repository and to manage their publication series. In order to model and control both, the organisational and the technical parts of complex publishing processes, a general sta te machine is applied with the help of which workflows can be defined and monitored conveniently. It enables the combination of automatically processed actions (e.g. conversion processes) and user driven activities (e.g. metadata management). The SCOPE architecture is currently used by research institutes both, inside and outside the university.