Archive:Tutorial:Creating an online publication

Executive summary

Choosing a name

Short summary & See Tutorial:Naming articles and publications = chapter 1. Naming articles: 1.1=>1.11 + Note

Creating an online publication

2.1 and 2.2

Statistics Explained as the production platform for all publications

Statistics Explained is a wiki: a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content (Oxford dictionaries). It uses Mediawiki software, also powering Wikipedia and numerous other huge collaborative websites, and has an extensive set of tools to facilitate collaboration: sophisticated access control, hidden drafts, history with near-perfect versioning and tracking changes, notification system, discussion page, differentiated user management, ...

Even when the final objective is a print-ready fully lay-outed PDF, it is much more efficient to use these tools and prepare a publication in Statistics Explained from the earliest possible moment, right after the agreement on a tentative table of contents or the very first rough draft of an article. Compared to the reverse traditional way of drafting in Word to the very end, sending back and forth a confusing number of versions overgrown with track changes, without a central place to bring them all together with comments and validations; and finally converting the print PDF to a Statistics Explained version for the majority of users, much more time-consuming and difficult than the opposite.

Another non negligible feature of working the wiki way is that it activates and enables statistics producers and disseminators, making authors relatively independent from other instances and elaborate procedures, so they can arrive at a presentable and professional result available to audiences in a very short time.

'Online first’ principle

Apart from aforementioned consideration that using wiki tools from the beginning is easier and more efficient, other strong arguments favour the ‘online first’ principle, that the first and primary product of Eurostat’s publication process is the internet version in Statistics Explained:

• The printed PDF, although nice to be leafed through and for completing a collection on a shelf, is not the primary product in terms of usability, but rather the Statistics Explained article with its many additional features and links and its integration within the whole publication output. The PDF is a derived niche product, with ‘flagship’ importance for management, policy DGs and decision makers, but hardly convenient for reusing the data and analysis.

• As a result, the online version by far exceeds paper/print in actual use: views of an online publication and its separate articles are at least 100 times the readership of the print version, as is proven by a comparison of past download figures and present page views of for instance the Yearbook and its articles.

Creating a PDF/paper version

intro 2 + 2.3

Publications viewed from the perspective of producing a PDF/paper version from Statistics Explained, fall into 3 categories, discussed separately below (see 2.3): 1. Statistics in focus: statistical articles presenting once-only in-depth analysis rather than mere data update, authored, with more sophisticated PDF version via specially inserted tags; 2. Online publications with extended chapters, each corresponding to one Statistics Explained article; these can be compendium publications still available as PDF (Regional yearbook and The EU in the world), statistical books presenting an overview of a statistical theme/topic or data relevant for EU policies, methodological publications, …; 3. Pocketbooks presenting an overview of statistical theme(s) or topic(s) with short chapters consisting of short text and accompanying table(s) or figure(s), derived from but not exactly corresponding to one Statistics Explained article; The majority of Statistics Explained articles and online publications, however, has no publishable PDF/paper version, except for a basic PDF with minimal layout.

From Statistics Explained article to PDF/paper output

When an online publication consisting of several or one single Statistics Explained article is ready, it serves as the basis for creating the PDF print version. This can be done before the article is published and visible to all - actually this is the most common case, especially if the online release is to be synchronised with a press release and the presentation of a printed version.

Statistics in focus

For Statistics in focus articles the conversion to a printable PDF takes place entirely within Statistics Explained, using Mediawiki tools, by the Dissemination unit: in the final publishing stage, after content has been checked and validated, special tags are inserted for adding the SIF header, properly displaying title and subtitle (inversed from online article), resizing and positioning images, having some parts only printed and others only displayed in online version, etc. More information on the status of SIFs and the workflow to produce and validate them can be found in the tutorial ‘Creating a Statistics in focus article’ (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Tutorial:Creating_a_Statistics_in_focus_article).

Online publications with extended chapters

For all publications with 1/1 relationship between SE article and PDF sections or chapters, deriving a print-ready PDF version from the Statistics Explained articles consists of reordering, leaving out and/or adding text, and finally lay-outing and print preparation. The PDF creation, as the final stage of the publication process, is often outsourced and not done by the authors of the online publication (of course, the first stage, creation of the Statistics Explained version, can also be outsourced and done by the same contractor preparing the PDF). Q: can framework contract be used for this?

Pocketbooks

As already mentioned above in the part on naming articles (see 1.7), Pocketbooks are NOT created by first drafting downsized ‘Pocketbook’ Statistical articles in Statistics Explained, as for users this is sure to create confusion with the full-sized version. From a producers’ perspective also, there is little or no added value or efficiency gain. Instead, content from existing or newly-created Statistics Explained articles is taken out and trimmed down to the required size and format, often by an external contractor.

The steps to create a new Pocketbook are:

• Define and select content: Pocketbook chapters and corresponding Statistics Explained articles: usable as such, to be modified, or to be created; although not strictly necessary, it is recommended to create an online publication from these articles, corresponding to but not identical to the more limited Pocketbook in PDF format;
• Update and/or modify, if required, existing Statistics Explained articles;
• Create new Statistics Explained articles (somewhat more complete than their corresponding Pocketbook chapter as they also need, apart from the analysis (Main statistical findings), the mandatory sections ‘Data sources and availability, Context, Further Eurostat information, …);
• Take out the content and redraft and lay-out it to required Pocketbook format.
• Create a print-ready PDF version.

Conclusions

Statistics Explained is the central repository of all publication output of Eurostat. In this environment a logical and coherent naming system of articles, as proposed in this paper, is necessary both for users and producers. Statistics Explained is also the production platform for publications, many of which are only available online where most users access them. Print PDF/paper publications are derived from an online version, in three possible ways described above: PDF creation wholly in Statistics Explained (Statistics in focus), extraction for full-sized equivalent (most PDF publications) and extraction for downsized equivalent (Pocketbooks).