The Cyberdocs platform provides tools, but also a model, allowing an institution to publish scientific literature, such as thesis, reports, journals, and so on.

Two main principles are associated to the platform:

1. Free software: Cyberdocs is a free platform (GPL) and uses it free software. This approach allows everyone to use it without coercion, to improve it, to contribute to its development, to share its experience, to translate it, the document, and so on. It is a real project of cooperation between different partners, financiers, developers, users.
2. The structured documents: Cyberdocs's publishing model is based on XML standard structured documents, which has several advantages, including interesting possibilities for consultation, perennial archiving, simple exchanges, etc.

Publication model

The Cyberdocs publishing model is to produce an XML (DTD TEILite) structured document format, which will become the reference document that will be used for archiving and publication.
The aim is to obtain this reference document with the least effort possible, starting from the documents as produced by the authors, most often with a word processor.

Publication process

The publication process of the Cyberdocs chain is composed by those steps:

Documents preparation

An operator (it could be the author, a librarian, etc.) will use a word processing document and prepare it adequately. This preparation is to use certain styles to identify parts of the content, ensure that the styles Title 1, Part 2 are used for the table of contents, prepare line drawings for pixelisation, etc. But increasingly, the work has been carried out directly by the author that uses models of documents proposed by the word processor or the scientific institution in which he works.

Example: the thesis model document from the University of Lyon 2.

Metadata preparation

Metadata associated to the document have to be prepared, which consist in the creation of an XML document containing those metadata.

XML conversion

The conversion feature of the Cyberdocs platform can convert word processing document beforehand prepared in an XML document respecting the DTD TEILite. The management module of the Cyberdocs platform can fly most of these operations through a Web interface very easy to use.

File production for static publishing

If necessary HTML, XHTML and PDF versions are produced (from the XML format) in order to allow a static diffusion of the documents, on a network or on a CD-ROM, for example.

Publication

The publication module makes available documents, with an easy consultation and exploiting the documents structure, as well as literature searches accurate within a document or a collection of documents.