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Press Release - FIGARO
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Peter Suber
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Sep 17, 2002 06:42 PDT
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[Forwarding from FIGARO. --Peter.]
For Immediate Release
September 17, 2002
FIGARO - European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway
You can also click the appropriate link below to access a translated
version of this press release in:
French, German, Swedish, Polish, Dutch and Italian at:
http://www.figaro-europe.net/index2.html?news.html
Utrecht, the Netherlands -- A collective of European universities and
publishers today 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 further develop their network 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.
For more information about FIGARO visit the website at
http://www.figaro-europe.net/index.html
Or contact:
Natalia Grygierczyk, Utrecht University Library
+31 30 253 6516
mailto:N.Grygi-@library.uu.nl
If you wish to be removed from the FIGARO database please send a message
to Aris Jan van Ek mailto:a.va-@library.uu.nl with the subject line REMOVE.
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