Automatic XML Extraction from Word and Formatting of E-Book Formats: Insight into the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I enjoyed reading your article: 
Automatic XML extraction from Word and formatting of e-book 2 formats: Insight into the Open Source Academic Publishing 3 Suite (OS-APS)

Please consider the following: 

1. Can the authors expand upon what they mean here?

 ..."and various e-journal or e-book output formats (e.g. XML, HTML, EPUB, and PDFs) 50 can be generated in a corporate design."

 

 2. Why is there no mention of machine learning? Isn't this what the project uses to produce its results?

 

3. Typo here:

ter obtaining a structured overview of various publishing processes through these 103 interviews, a broader online survey was designed on this basis to reach a lot of more experts from the publishing community.

 

4. In all instances, change commas to periods when representing numerals (eg, In Fig 1, 2,0% should be 2.0% and so forth).

 

5. Grammar isn’t great here:

Methodologically, it was planned to build on existing

 

6. Does it matter which version of MS Word an author uses or do all version work/convert seamlessly? Perhaps the author can include a comment to this effect.

 

7. Be consistent with the capitalization of Word as in here:

In this particular case word*.docx templates are uploaded into the OS-APS en-174 vironment and specific output formats can be generated for importing into the OJS of the 175 ULB-SA.

 

8. Change “citations rate” to “citation rates” here:

This process streamlines the template generation process of editorial teams, in-176 creases its level of automatization, and generally contributes to an increase in citations 177 rate and visibility.

 

9. This sounds a bit too “commercial" or "salesy" - I'm not sure it belongs in an academic publication.

 

The open source software can be downloaded free of charge from https://os-aps.de 200 and a suitable repository, presumably GitLab, after the end of the project (31.12.2022, if 201 necessary the project will be extended cost-neutrally, then possibly also later in spring 202 2023). Alternatively, a paid hosting and support offering from SciFlow can be used: 203 https://www.sciflow.net. The business and fee model for this will also be announced in 204 parallel with the phase-out of the project. 205

Accompanying documentation of the software.

 

10. This also sounds too commercial for an academic publication and should be removed/re-phrased:

3.4. Test possibility of the current results 255

Every first Wednesday of the month, a “Demo Day” takes place, where interested 256 parties are invited to test the current state of the OS-APS software and give feedback. The 257 dial-in data for the video conference is published on the OS-APS website shortly before 258 the event: https://os-aps.de/demo/. 259

For the final release of the software

 

11. Could the authors comment on why they did not address the utility of HTML on journal/book/publisher websites? This would be invaluable for bibliometric analysis (by editors, authors, publishers).

4.2. Discussion about embedding the new output formats 277

What publishers or platforms do with the new output formats remains deliberately 278 open and up for discussion. Those who previously only distributed PDFs via OJS, OMP 279 or repositories (e.g. the university repository, in the case of university presses), must think 280 about how and where they integrate the HTML or EPUB files when using OS-APS, e.g., 281 Publications 2022, 10, x FOR PEER REVIEW 8 of 9whether they provide viewers or corresponding plug-ins and whether they also archive 282 them over the long term (or continue to only archive PDF/A).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The work describes a working system for converting msword files to XML. It certainly takes a lot of effort to make the system working. But this effort is not really research: the paper does not describe which (research) issues had been faced, or which solutions were tried or selected.

I think that the authors had faced some research issues, and these issues had to be described here.

The conclusions are very poor too.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This item, submitted as an article, might be better published in the case reports. It details a tool, OS-APS,  that would be of much use to publishers and would solve a very large problem in publishing: the difficulty (and expense) of conversion of Word documents to XML and HTML. The tool itself and the background are good contributions to the publishing world and it is interesting to read about the circumstances in which it was developed and tested. However, this article is not a research or empirical article itself. It presents no hypotheses and no experiments, and no data. There is also a lack of comparison to other existing tools like the SciElo XML converter or the Texture editor and how this might complement, interface, or compete with these other tools. This really reads more like a case study and history of software development than a research article itself.

I would recommend that the authors revise this article as a case report of their product. It would be ideal to include a comparison to other XML conversion tools, providing a side-by-side demonstration of how the OS-APS tool compares to these others, and then expanding on the case study with the two journals from ULB-SA and the implementation there as a roadmap for others who might want to use the tool. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciate the revisions to the submission which have improved it. If this is acceptable to the editors of the journal, I think it will be useful to the readership.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The improvements of the paper are mostly syntactic.

There is a new session added: "Practical application of OS-APS", but still, as the authors say "... there is no finished user case yet as the software is still being developed", and not much new information is included there. It is not easy to improve the paper, as the real issues are in the foundations of the work, not in its description. Thus, the old problems mostly remain. This is neither a paper with theoretical backgrownd nor a (mature or finished) case study. The authors could resubmit when their project is more mature, and they have more results to show.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for your edits and your thoughtful reply. This is a helpful addition. One small additional edit for your new section 5 - please state what other XML tools you are referring to in your comparison of this tool. Then I think this article is good to move ahead.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf