Many small scientific journals produce each format separately: someone lays out the PDF in one program, another hand-builds the HTML for the website, and the indexing XML —when it exists at all— is assembled apart and almost always late. Each version drifts from the others, and a last-minute change means redoing the work three times.
The idea in one sentence
Single-source publishing: one source from which every publication format is generated automatically.
In the single-source model, the article is composed once in a structured source (at Macomti, a ConTeXt environment). From that same file, the following are exported without manual reconversion:
- PDF/A for print and long-term archiving (ISO 19005).
- JATS XML for indexing in SciELO, DOAJ, Latindex, Redalyc and Crossref.
- Accessible HTML (WCAG 2.1) for reading on the web.
- ePub for digital distribution.
Why it benefits you
Three concrete benefits for the journal:
- Consistency. Every format comes from the same source, so they all say exactly the same thing. No PDF that says one thing and HTML that says another.
- Speed. A correction is applied once and propagates to every output. The second issue is always faster than the first.
- A system, not loose PDFs. The journal keeps a reusable template; every issue is composed the same way, with the same quality.
In short: single-source turns the journal's production from a series of repeated manual tasks into a reproducible system. It is the heart of Macomti's service.