1. Develop a practice-based cross-disciplinary transmedia design and publishing research framework, including the establishment of a stakeholder and knowledge exchange network to facilitate the involvement of a wide variety of users of academic publishing, to address core issues (one related to platform independent publications and the creation of a structured document for print & transmedia publishing, the other related to enhanced transmedia and analogue media citation management) in the transition to transmedia publishing approaches of academic research;
    
2. Definitively assess platform independent publication file types to ensure texts and images from research outcomes can migrate to new digital forms of the book and other transmedia formats across open learning systems. The project proposes a platform independent document format, based on a compare and contrast analysis of existing formats including OASIS, ODT, and the W3C and IDPF standards of EPUB3 and HTML5 (e.g. IDPF, EDUPUB as of 2014, with submissions by Pearson and O`Reilly);
    
3. Facilitate research and publishing workflow integration. Because these formats have yet to be integrated into the working environments, habits, tools, and workflows of academics, the project maps research processes (selected via stakeholder and knowledge exchange) onto digital publishing workflows to explore how material across media types can be made digitally compatible, taking into account available tools, academic conventions, training, and skill levels;
    
4. Provide user research to support workflow analysis and take extra-academic users of research outcomes into account in the development of strategies to facilitate the integration of structured document processes into the academic publication lifecycle with minimal disruption;
    
5. Develop open source code. Working with industry partners including Data Futures (UK), HPC (EU/US), le-tex (DE), Nätverkstan (SE), and Open Academia Foreningen (NO), and standards bodies like W3C and IDPF, the project produces software and code to complement and modify available open source solutions;
    
6. Develop user experience design for the document format to inform users about two sets of issues: 1. how changes to the document to add structure effect its meaning, and 2. how to allow previews of the multi-format outputs where the target outputs require intervention to preserve the integrity of the publication;
    
7. Offer enhanced transmedia citation and reference management to specify points in media (for example in a video, game sequence or social graph) in an academic citation management for transmedia publishing that is backwards-compatible with analogue and print media;
    
8. Combine technical and GUI research into transmedia hyperlinking in target media types to enhance transmedia citation management;
    
9. Propose transmedia mnemonics. The technology of print media has complex mnemonic and navigational features. But while style guides exist to help scholars organise their citations and aid the reader to make best use of these references, the layering of computational media onto of print culture has not been addressed in many publication style guides for the Humanities (including MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, or Harvard Style). The project will develop and propose enhanced methods of mnemonics to help the reader use and navigate transmedia publications;
    
10. Create a prototype platform to demonstrate a transmedia publishing workflow.

These research objectives provide a manageable research focus, yet open up onto the entire range of digital publishing workflow issues, allowing the research project to co-develop additional options for follow-up across stakeholder networks.