On 1 February W3C announced that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) will combine their organizations to set up a new roadmap for Digital Publishing. Ivan Herman, researcher at CWI, has played a seminal role in this combination. The plans for this combination had been publicly announced in May 2016, and CWI congratulates both organizations for the successful finalization of the discussions.
The Publishing@W3C roadmap includes the creation of new standards that will allow a smooth transition between high quality publishing accessed online as well as offline, while being based the latest Web technologies. The long tradition of the publishing community in terms of developing, curating, and managing high quality publications will be combined with the innovative and interactive nature of the Web, leading to new type of digital publications, as well as a greater accessibility of traditional ones. This may improve and innovate, for example, scholarly publishing on the Web, yielding new types of interactive digital journal articles, academic e-books or interactive courses.
As the leader of the activity in Digital Publishing at the W3C for about four years, Ivan Herman has been active in building bridges between the two communities, both technically and socially. He will also be part of the leadership, as part of the Publishing@W3C as well as the overall Strategy teams of W3C, of the upcoming technical work for the development of the new standards. Ivan Herman is a member of the Distributed and Interactive Systems research group at CWI.
Jos Baeten, general director of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), says: "As an academic research institution, it is in CWI's interest to see academic publishing evolve towards a more Web based, interactive, and globally accessible form of communication, providing a superior user experience for researchers both online and offline. We are greatly encouraged by, and welcome the combination of IDPF and W3C, which we believe will help bringing us closer to a new type of environment for scholarly publishing."
For more information on the combination and corresponding testimonials, see the W3C Press Release.
On the w3c.nl website a Dutch translation of a summary of the W3C and IDPF press release can be found.
Picture: <small>Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO; Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director; George Kerscher, IDPF President; Bill McCoy, IDPF Executive Director, at DigiCon 10 May 2016, when the plans were announced. Source: W3C. </small>
