The first Beta build of the Article Authoring Add-in went live at the end of the past month, and is now available for download. The add-in is designed to integrate seamlessly with Office Word 2007, and was unveiled during the Society for Scholarly Publishing event in Boston on May 30. The Article Authoring Add-in is a tool set up to permit authors to manage their work from Word 2007 into a format specific for scientific articles. Documents in the National Library of Medicine's XML Journal Publishing format can now be opened and saved from Word 2007 with the add-in installed.

"The Add-In is a very positive development that will help scholars to write and tag their articles in the industry-standard NLM XML DTD, and will help publishers to process these articles in their editorial and production departments," explained Ahmed Hindawi, CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation.

Microsoft revealed that the Article Authoring Add-in supports not only the NLM XML DTD standard, but also the NCBI Book format. The aim is, of course, to bridge the digital gap between scientific authors and journals. "We are pleased to be working with Microsoft on testing and refining this important tool that will benefit scholars and scholarly publishers alike", Hindawi added.

On top of the additional document formats support, the Article Authoring Add-in also delivers the possibility to put together article templates in accordance with the framework of the specific journals the scientific articles are authored for. At this point in time, Microsoft estimates that the final version of the add-in will be made available in the second half of 2008.

Still, as early as Beta 1, the Article Authoring Add-in extends the authors ability to integrate advanced semantic information into their articles, as well as manage metadata. The add-in will play well with data native of Word 2007, but also with controls including Design Science's MathType, in terms of Math content.

"We were happy to work with Microsoft to add support for Equation Editor and MathType equations to the Article Authoring add-in. Since at least 85% of the articles containing math submitted to scientific journals have equations in those formats, this support is critical," stated Paul Topping, President and CEO of Design Science.

Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 is available for download here.