The Scholarly Communications team in Microsoft Research is organizing a workshop as part of the Open Repositories 09 conference. During the workshop we’ll demonstrate and discuss lots of the technologies we’ve been building over the last couple of years to help with the scholarly communications lifecycle. The entire team will be there: Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, Pablo Fernicola. I’ll be there as an ex-team member.

Tony Hey and Lee Dirks will also be keynoting at the conference and will announce, amongst other things, v1.0 of our repository platform (including its official name). Should be lots of fun!

Here’s the description of the workshop.

Tools for Repositories – Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem

Microsoft External Research strongly supports the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology, and interoperability. We partner with universities, national libraries, publishers, and governmental organizations to help develop tools and services to evolve the scholarly information lifecycle. These projects demonstrate our ongoing work towards producing next-generation documents that increase productivity and empower authors to increase the discoverability and appropriate re-use of their work. This workshop will provide a deep dive into several freely available and open source tools from Microsoft External Research, and will demonstrate how these can help supplement and enhance current repository offerings.

Come learn more about how the Microsoft Research tools can help extend the reach and utility of your repository efforts. Each session during the day will include a hands-on component so that attendees can gain a deeper technical understanding of the available toolset, which includes the following resources:

• Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007
  • Structured document authoring (based on the NLM-DTD)
  • Ontology integration and markup
  • Repository search integration
  • ORE Resource Map authoring
  • Article repository submission workflow (via REST and SWORD interfaces)
• Microsoft eJournal Service – a hosted peer-review workflow system
• Zentity – A research-output repository platform
• Research Information Centre – a collaboration space for researchers
• Windows Live Machine Translation Service
• Document Conversion Service

More information on each of these tools can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/scholarlycomm

For workshop registration and related questions, please e-mail the workshop convener at: scholar@microsoft.com