Microsoft continues to provide ample proof of its commitment to support the academic community deal with collecting, storing and publishing information, and the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit acted as the stage for the company's latest initiative in this regard. Microsoft Research unveiled a number of free software tools aimed at taking collaboration and sharing of research data to the next level. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007, the Microsoft e-Journal Service, the Research Output Repository Platform and the Research Information Centre have become available to academia via the Microsoft Scholarly Communication website.

"Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers - with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We're supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs," explained Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's External Research Division.

Microsoft's end goals with its support for the academic community are translated into what the company referred to as "open access, open tools, open technology and interoperability." The Redmond giant is a little shy about throwing its billions at research projects for the sake of innovation and believes that collaborative research efforts will in fact lead to the revolutions it is looking for.

With the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007, Microsoft is allowing researchers to make metadata an integer part of every document starting from the earliest authoring phases. At the same time, in addition to ensuring that the structure and semantic data associated with Word 2007 content survives, the company is making it easy for authors to embed a Creative Commons licenses into Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents via the Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007.

With the Microsoft e-Journal Service, self-published materials take a life all of their own, following the migration online. On top of this, Microsoft is offering an entirely new perspective in terms of the semantic relationships between various forms of academic content via the Research Output Repository Platform. And last but not least, the Research Information Centre, with Office SharePoint Server 2007 aims to provide a centralized resource for all aspects of the research lifecycle.