Interesting. So exactly what is the "document publisher" and how does it relate to the word-processor?

BTW, I and a guy on the BiblioX list experimented a bit and found that we could define our own citation schema, embed citations based on that schema in WordML (via Word 2003), and format it by running an XSLT on export.

I was thinking of the 'document publisher' (the only term I could come up with just then) as a kind of XML-based equivalent to the bibtex step in processing a TeX document, or the Endnote step in a Word document. It would take the body of the text, containing citation keys, format the citations and produce the bibliography, resulting in the final XML for transformation into the published document. It might make sense to put this at the point in the chain where the table of contents and/or indexes are generated.

Inserting citations in WordML sounds interesting - are you able to both generate the bibliography and format the in-text citations in that way?

If I understand BiblioX correctly, that would be used after the 'document publisher' (maybe 'document compiler' would be a better term) step. The 'document publisher' would take the XML from the word processor, say in DocBook format, query RefDB using the citation keys, and insert the bibliography at the end. BiblioX would then be used on that final XML file to transform the bibliography into the appropriate style for the receiving journal.

Actually I might have got that wrong: it seems that RefDB could do the 'document publisher' bit as well, to create the final XML including bibliography.