Following the important May 2025 announcement in Germany by ZB MED of OLSPub - the Open Life Science publication database - there now exists an open, reliable, and sustainable alternative to the US-based PubMed database of biomedical research publication metadata:
https://www.zbmed.de/en/research/current-projects/olspub
The GitHub repository then was created by Réalta Online Publishing Services Ltd. as a set of simple tools to assist OLSPub users of PubMed metadata XML files. These tools recognize that having to deal with raw XML markup can be discomfiting to those allergic to angle brackets:
https://github.com/RealtaOnline/PubNote?tab=readme-ov-file#readme
An important property of the rendering tools in this package is the off-the-shelf running implementation of sustainable single-source publishing practices. This sustainability concept was introduced at JATS-Con 2023 in contrast (in the author's opinion) to traditional relatively unsustainable single-source publishing practices. OLSPub users can trigger human-oriented visualizations of PubMed XML metadata in PDF, HTML, and DOCX syntax for their review in their favourite tools.
This presentation first introduces the new OLSPub resource and how it services the life sciences research community. The suite of simple tools is described, illustrating the results available to users.
Sustainable single source XML publishing is reviewed, and the open-source tools supplied in the repository that implement sustainable single source publishing are enumerated and demonstrated.
Presentation, 7 November 2025
Ken is an armchair baseball enthusiast and with
his wife a co-founder of Crane Softwrights Ltd.
who has provided consulting and training
services in markup technologies since 1997. In
his retirement he continues to travel the world
speaking at conferences and volunteering in
international standards committees, in
transnational health services, and in NGO
humanitarian efforts in Africa. Ask him about
baseball, XML/XSLT, or OASIS UBL and he will talk your ear off.
