On October 25 and 26, 2021, we hosted the 18th annual eXtyles User Group meeting, which was also the second XUG Online.
As well as being shoes-optional, XUG 2021 took place across nine countries on six continents!
Read on to learn what happened at this year’s XUG and how you can access slide decks and video presentations from the online meeting.
Be our guest!
Guest speakers joined us this year from Cabells, FASS, ISO, Mulberry Technologies, NISO, Typefi, the US Geological Survey, and Wiley, bringing in the perspectives of eXtyles customers and Inera technology partners as well as expertise in standards development, DTDs, and the author submission experience. We appreciate our guest speakers’ time, effort, and enthusiasm for XUG!
The content was interesting and useful, and it was nice to catch up with people in the social sessions. Well done!
For this year’s XUG Online we tested out a new platform, Wonder.me, for our social breaks. If you tried it, let us know what you thought!
What’s new and what’s next
In classic XUG fashion, Liz Blake opened the proceedings with a whirlwind tour through not only the past year of eXtyles and Edifix development, but also everything else Inera has been up to, including webinars, accessibility initiatives, technology partnerships, and future plans for cloud solutions!
→ Check out Liz’s slides here.
This year’s Flash Talks session continued this theme, featuring overviews of our new and improved eXtyles user documentation, Atypon’s community initiatives, eXtyles for 64-bit Office, and eXtyles in the cloud from members of our marketing and development teams.
From FASS Inc., Louise Adam and Ron Keller presented a field report on the eXtyles Arc workflow recently implemented at their organization, including the considerations that led them towards greater automation, their implementation and testing process, and the next step: batch processing!
→ Check out Louise and Ron’s slides here.
Collaborative problem-solving in action
Workflow problems: everyone’s got ’em!
At Inera, we’ve always believed that the best problem-solving happens in conversation with our customers. Featuring speakers from FASS, ISO, USGS, and Typefi, our “Problems & Solutions” panel—a new feature at XUG 2021—showcased interesting workflow challenges and the collaborative (and sometimes creative!) ways in which customers, Inerans, and technology partners have solved them together.
→ See the Problems & Solutions slides here: USGS | FASS | ISO
Once again, you presented a compelling, engaging, and cohesive conference that made the most of the virtual environment. Thank you!
In her session “Whose Content Is It Anyway?” Joni Dames, starting with the deceptively simple question of how to successfully mark up your content for PubMed Central, took us on a journey through the many stakeholders that need to be considered in creating and delivering XML content.
→ Check out Joni’s slides here.
Back to the future (of reference processing)
Reference processing is central to our work at Inera, and we’re always looking for ways to make it more accurate, more useful, and more user-friendly! In “The Future of Reference Processing,” Bruce Rosenblum joined Gary Spencer (Wiley) and Simon Linacre (Cabells) for a deep dive into what’s ahead.
→ You can find the Future of Reference Processing slides here: Bruce | Gary | Simon
We also welcomed back Debbie Lapeyre (Mulberry Technologies) for a tour of the latest updates to JATS, BITS, and NISO STS, and Nettie Lagace (NISO) to tell us about new and upcoming standards and best practices projects.
What’s really important? (Spoiler: not article submission format)
We ended the second day of XUG with Bruce Rosenblum’s “Industry Updates” talk, which this year included such disparate topics as strange AI behaviors, the false promises of accessibility overlays, the challenges of identifying citations to software and data, and why it matters when journals’ or publishers’ author instructions are confusing, contradictory, or out of date.
Bruce was better than ever, and left us all with a lot to think about! All in all, very very enjoyable.
We’re always glad to see you!
Registrants who want to revisit certain talks—or catch presentations they missed—have access to the full video archive, with closed captions and chat transcripts; check your inbox for an email including the Vimeo link. If you attended XUG 2021, thank you for helping us to make it great! If not, we hope to see you at a future XUG.