The New Nation - Internet Edition

Saying it wants to help scholars and publishers write, edit, and publish academic articles, this week Microsoft Corporation rolled out a set of new software tools to perform those tasks, as well as to navigate thorny copyright issues and find and share scholarly data.

The tools are add-ons to popular programs such as Microsoft Office Word. The move is clearly designed to extend the company's reach into new forms of academic publishing, and Microsoft made its announcement here at the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, which was attended by about 400 researchers and technology officials from research universities.

For example, the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables authors to structure and annotate their documents according to formats that publishers and digital archives require. The articles can then be converted easily to formats that facilitate their digital storage and preservation. The company is offering the new software free to licensed users of Word and other Microsoft products.The tool allows users to create documents in the widely used format developed by the National Library of Medicine's free digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life-sciences journal literature, PubMed Central. But users will also be able to shape the software to suit other formats because the code for the tool is openly accessible and freely adaptable. The products, initially aimed at scientists, also seek to make it easier for authors and editors to electronically embed into papers details about the research process and its results, such as bibliographies and key phrases. The goal, Microsoft officials said, is to help readers who conduct searches in electronic databases find relevant articles more easily.

The new tools will enable a more dynamic way of discovering and exploring links within enormous and hard-to-search bodies of research, the officials said.

"We've never before addressed what we could put around Office, Excel, SharePoint, and our other programs to make them more useful for science," said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's external-research division. "For example, Word was not tailored for scientific papers. But we decided to see, Can we make it more useful in that way?"

He said the company is also responding to the demand for researchers to provide greater access to their findings, and even their research data. Already the National Institutes of Health requires that any publications from research it finances be placed in PubMed Central within one year of publication. The National Science Foundation has a similar requirement, as do Harvard University's faculties of law and of arts and sciences.