[Fwd: FIGARO launches to provide e-publishing support]

["Olga Francois" <ofrancois@xxxxxxxx>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FIGARO launches to provide e-publishing support
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 21:54:18 -0400
From: Alison Buckholtz <alison@xxxxxxx>
Reply-To: sparc-friends@xxxxxxx

Hello everyone,

SPARC has been involved with FIGARO, a new E.U.-backed project which
will create e-publishing support for the European academic community,
since last year, and we would like to pass on to you news of its 
launch and its tremendous potential. 
____________________
For Immediate Release
17 September, 2002

For more information:
Natalia Grygierczyk, University of Utrecht Library
+31 30 253 6516
mailto:N.Grygierczyk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

FIGARO - European Academic Digital Publishing Initiative Underway

Utrecht, 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.


-- 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Alison Buckholtz
Associate Enterprise Director
SPARC -- The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition
21 Dupont Circle, Ste. 800, Washington, DC  20036 USA
T: 202 296 2296 x115 * F: 202 872 0884 * E: alison@xxxxxxx
http://www.arl.org/sparc    http://www.sparceurope.org
http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI
http://www.createchange.org