EPUB as publication format in Open Access journals: Tools and workflow

• Main Authors: Trude Eikebrokk, Tor Arne Dahl, Siri Kessel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Code4Lib 2014-04-01
• Series: Code4Lib Journal
• Online Access: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/9462

In this article, we present a case study of how the main publishing format of an Open Access journal was changed from PDF to EPUB by designing a new workflow using JATS as the basic XML source format. We state the reasons and discuss advantages for doing this, how we did it, and the costs of changing an established Microsoft Word workflow. As an example, we use one typical sociology article with tables, illustrations and references. We then follow the article from JATS markup through different transformations resulting in XHTML, EPUB and MOBI versions. In the end, we put everything together in an automated XProc pipeline. The process has been developed on free and open source tools, and we describe and evaluate these tools in the article. The workflow is suitable for non-professional publishers, and all code is attached and free for reuse by others.