Scholarly Communication
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Microsoft Tools and Resources (new)
Microsoft External Presentations
Overview
Microsoft External Research collaborates with the world's foremost researchers in academia, across industries and governments, to advance research and fuel innovation. Working closely with researchers is an essential part of the Microsoft External Research engagement model; the research team serves as a critical link between academia and Microsoft product groups that develop and use new technologies from across the corporation.
Collecting and analyzing data and authoring, publishing, and preserving information are essential components researchers' daily work—with collaboration and search and discovery augmenting the entire process. At each phase, Microsoft technologies play an increasingly fundamental role. The Microsoft External Research vision is to support the scholarly communications lifecycle with software and services so that data and information flow in a coordinated and seamless fashion.
By working with members of the research community, Microsoft External Research is developing a series of technologies that are designed for researchers and academics with the following goals in mind:
| • | Optimize for data-driven research and science |
| • | Enable broad community engagement through greater interoperability |
| • | Help ensure that data storage is reliable and secure for the long term |
| • | Build on existing community protocols, practices, and guidelines |
| • | Harness collective intelligence through social networking and semantic knowledge discovery |
Microsoft Tools and Resources
The Research Information Centre (Beta)
Developed in close collaboration with the British Library, the Research Information Centre is a virtual research environment (VRE). It was designed to allow research partners to store, share, discuss, manage, find, and track all the components of a research project—including data, references, papers, bookmarks, proposals, internal messages, information, and findings—within a simple interface. Through support of the research workflow, this tool can simplify the process of information search, facilitate discovery, effectively manage research objects, and enable versioning and archiving. The collaboration environment resides within a hosted Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform, which is accessible from a Web browser. This service is currently in beta testing. Microsoft intends to share the code widely by the end of the year.
Article Authoring Add-in v1.0 for Microsoft Office Word 2007
The Article Authoring Add-in enables authors and editors to open and save Microsoft Office Word files in the National Library of Medicine's NLM XML format, a file format that is used in the publishing and archiving of scientific and technical articles. Beyond its core file format capabilities, the add-in enables additional metadata to be captured at the authoring stage and enables semantic information to be preserved through the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search and semantic analysis once the articles are archived at information repositories. The add-in also aims at simplifying the authoring, submission, and interaction process between authors and journals.
| • | Get more information and download the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 |
| • | Read about this project in Pablo Fernicola's MSDN blog |
| • | Watch a video to see the add-in at work (youtube.com) |
Creative Commons Add-in v1.0 for Microsoft Office
This add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, and Office Excel 2007 enables individuals to embed a Creative Commons license directly into their Microsoft Office documents. The add-in allows an author of a Microsoft Office document to choose a Creative Commons license from those available on the Creative Commons Web site (by using the Creative Commons Web service). The embedded license links directly to its online representation on the Creative Commons Web site while a machine-readable representation is stored in the Office Open XML document. By using Creative Commons licenses, you can express your intentions regarding how others may use your work.
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| • | Source code project on CodePlex (codeplex.com) |
| • | Learn more about Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) |
| • | Learn more about the choices among the Creative Commons Licenses (creativecommons.org) |
Word Add-in for Ontology Recognition
The goal of the add-in is to assist scientists in writing a manuscript that is easily integrated with existing and pending electronic resources. The major aims of this project are to add semantic information as XML mark-up to the manuscript using ontologies and controlled vocabularies (using OBO), and to integrate manuscript content with existing public data repositories.
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Microsoft eJournal Service (Alpha)
The Microsoft eJournal Service will provide a hosted, full-service solution to support scholarly societies, small publishers, and medium-sized publishers in the production of online-only journals. It is designed to simplify the self-publishing of workshop and conference proceedings and smaller journals, as well as online collaboration between authors. The service supports managing the submission and review of articles in any format, and the deposit of final articles in information repositories by using the SWORD protocol. An alpha version, available now, is hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007—allowing organizations to utilize this functionality without provisioning or maintaining any infrastructure.
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Zentity (Research Output Repository Platform) v1.0
Research output repositories are increasingly in use on university campuses and in research communities worldwide. Our platform for building repositories takes advantage of the strengths of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the Microsoft Entity Framework, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. This technology, available through a free download, provides services that are based on open community protocols (such as the Open Archives Initiative–Object Reuse and Exchange [OAI-ORE], SWORD, and so on), which enables interoperability and integration with other tools and services. An included toolkit and code samples allows developers to present data in original ways, demonstrating, for example, the relationships between a published paper, authors, research data, associated lectures, presentation slides, or PDFs.
| • | View slides from the Open Repositories 2008 conference in Southampton, UK |
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| • | Read about this project and look for code samples on Savas Parastatidis' blog |
The Microsoft Math Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007
The Microsoft Math Add-in enhances Microsoft Office Word 2007 with computational and graphing capabilities. With the add-in, you can perform the following:
| • | Plot a function, equation, or inequality |
| • | Solve an equation or inequality |
| • | Calculate a numerical result |
| • | Simplify an algebraic expression |
Download the Word 2007 Add-in: Microsoft Math from the Microsoft Download Center
You can use a linear format for entering equations into Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Math. Although this is not currently documented in the Office Word 2007 help files, you can find more information in the following document.
| • | Unicode Nearly Plain Text Encoding of Mathematics (unicode.org) (PDF file, 1.08 MB) |
External Links
| • | arXiv (arxiv.org)
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| • | myExperiment (myexperiment.org)
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| • | SWORD (Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit) (jisc.ac.uk)
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| • | Open Archives Initiative–Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) (openarchives.org/ore/)
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| • | PubMed Central (pubmedcentral.nih.gov/)
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| • | Murray Sargent's blog (blogs.msdn.com)
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| • | The Open University Mathematics Online Project Guide: Using the mathematical features of Word 2007 (mcs.open.ac.uk)
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| • | CT Watch Quarterly (August 2007 issue) (ctwatch.org)
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| • | Nature magazine's Nascent blog (blogs.nature.com)
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| • | Inera (inera.com)
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| • | Design Science (dessci.com)
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| • | HighWire Press (highwire.stanford.edu)
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Microsoft External Presentations
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Pre-meeting seminar: Word 2007 and Scholarly Publishing (inera.com)
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| • | Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (alpsp.org.uk)
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| • | The Future of Research Communication (alpsp.org) (PDF file, 3.52 MB) |
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. How can I covert 2007 Office MathML (OMML) to MathML?
A. Beta versions of the Office Word 2007 MathML Transforms (XSLT) are now available for download from the Microsoft Connect site.
Q. How can I extract OMML from the equations bitmap?
A. See Murray Sargent’s post on how one can extract the 2007 Office system MathML (OMML) from math-zone images stored in .doc files that have been converted for use in Office Word 2003 and earlier versions of Office Word.
Q. What are the names of the clipboard slots for MathML?
A. We write to and read from two clipboard slots entirely devoted to MathML. These are "MathML" and "Presentation MathML" (without the quotation marks). Note that we always sniff the text slot for Presentation MathML, and if we detect it, we will convert it to an equation on paste into Microsoft Office Word. We can also write Presentation MathML to the text slot, depending on the setting of the clipboard option under Equations | Tools | Equations Options.
Q. What is not allowed in an equation?
A. The following list is not the full set of the limitations to equations in Microsoft Office Word 2007, but it encapsulates the most important items both from a schema and typography perspective.
You can have only one font per equation. (The single font limitation pertains to math fonts only. You can use other fonts [for example] for characters in other languages.)
You can have only one font size per equation. Note that we automatically scale the script and script-script level, so that items such as superscripts and numerators of "small fractions" appear smaller than the regular text size. However, these characters are considered the same font size as the rest of the text in the equation.
We do not support TeX-style tweaks to positioning.
We do not support insertion of Office Word tables inside of equations. However, you are permitted to have equations inside of tables.
You cannot insert clip art, shapes, charts, WordArt, drop caps, or any breaks other than line breaks (page breaks, section breaks, and column breaks are disallowed).
You cannot specify the default vertical spacing between wrapped lines of the same equation. For a series of adjacent equations in the same paragraph, you cannot override the default spacing between the equations.
Some TeX-style tweaks are allowed. We support thin and other positive spaces, along with phantoms/smashes.
Q. How can I identify a .docx file by file signature rather than by file extension?
A. Take the following steps:
- Check that the file is a .zip file
- Check for a file called [Content_Types].xml at the root of the .zip
- Check for a file in /_rels/ called .rels
- Follow additional steps from the following article:
Building Word 2007 Documents Using Office Open XML Formats - Get the corresponding target attribute's value
- Open [Content_Type].xml
- Look for the Override element with the PartName attribute equal to the target attribute you obtained in step 5
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Check the ContentType attribute—it must be one of the following:
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document.main+xml
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template.main+xml
- application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.main+xml
- application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.main+xml
Q. Do moves in Microsoft Office Word 2007 show up as insertions and deletions when the file is opened in an earlier version of Office Word?
A. Yes. When Track Changes is on in an Office Word 2007 document and the document is opened in an earlier version of Word, moves are displayed as insertions and deletions.
Q. Does the Document Inspector scrub document variables along with document properties?
A. Yes. Document variables are removed when the Document Properties and Personal Information setting is checked and the Document Inspector is run.
Q. Can the Document Inspector be automated?
A. Yes. The Document Inspector can be automated whenever Winword.exe is running.
Upcoming Events
| • | International Repositories Workshop (ukoln.ac.uk)
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| • | RSP Repository Software Day (rsp.ac.uk)
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| • | Open Repositories 2009 (gatech.edu)
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