Write what you know: Enabling open, collaborative publications with commercial tools

Open Commentaries, a project of the New Alexandria Foundation, aims to allow scholars, educators, and enthusiasts to annotate and edit public domain texts. Previously, Open Commentaries maintained its own editing and reading environments, which, while accessible to editors and non-technical users, took resources away from the platform's core functionality of publishing digital editions. It also required editors to translate their work from their usual environment — Microsoft Word vel sim. — to Open Commentaries' writing tools. Moreover, source texts came mainly via TEI XML and required specialized knowledge and expertise to make full use of them. Recent advancements in the Open Commentaries platform have prioritized allowing editors to write their commentaries and editions using the tools that they know best, like Microsoft Word, Open/LibreOffice, and Markdown. (Gregory Nagy's "A Pausanias Reader in Progress" is currently being written in Microsoft Word, with updates being synced seamlessly to the Open Commentaries platform.) These commentaries can include not only textual data but also rich and interactive data like images, maps, and cross-references to other works or named entities. By leveraging syncing technologies and the open specifications behind these formats, Open Commentaries shortens the feedback loop between editing and publishing on the platform, allowing more people to take part in the collaborative process of producing online editions.