The AAS was founded to promote communication of research techniques and results within the astronomical community. While this mission has been enlarged through the years, the fostering of effective communication through the publication of high quality scholarly research journals and the organization of scientific meetings remains the prime purpose for the existence of the Society. The major AAS journals, the Astrophysical Journal together with the Astronomical Journal, comprise over half of the world's peer reviewed astronomical literature. Authors tend not to consider the parts which come after the preparation of the original manuscript. Publishers often concentrate on the job of preparation and typesetting, and think less about the other parts of the process.
Librarians worry most about making the literature available to the users.
And so it goes. We have analyzed the publishing process and have broken it down into six components. In any publishing activity, all these steps are needed in some form or other, and all must flow easily from one to the other. Author Preparation and Submission of the Electronic Manuscript Manuscripts must contain the logical markup needed to identify all the components, such as title, author, institutional affiliation, abstract, sections, figures, etc. When that is done at the beginning, i.e., by the author, the further processing of the manuscript can be carried out with a fair degree of automation.