2006 on Crossref

Google offer on journal archives

Ed Pentz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Suber reports on his Open Access News that Google is offering to digitize journal backfiles. The full text articles are available as images and for free hosted by Google. The deal is non-exclusive and publishers retain copyright (but many backfiles will be out of copyright) but Google will not supply the publisher with the electronic files - so non-exclusive means that the publisher or someone else could digitize the back-year records too (but how to recover the costs when it’s all free in Google?).

Dorothea Salo (recent STM Innovations speaker) over at Caveat Lector provides an excellent review of the Google offer with some good advice for publishers (“always control your bits”).

Exhibit A

Crossref — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

MIT’s Simile project has just released Exhibit, a ” lightweight structured data publishing framework.” Read that as “an easy-to-use mashup creation tool.” I have heard that Leigh has already started experimenting with it. I look forward to a writeup soon…

Speaking of STM Innovations

Ed Pentz — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The STM Innovations meeting on December 7th in London was excellent. Leigh Dodds has a short summary of the day on his blog. Interestingly, I can’t find anything about the conference on the STM website.

Zotero - next generation research tool?

Ed Pentz — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

1 was mentioned at the STM Innovations talk in London and it’s worth taking a look. It’s billed as the next generation of bibliographic management software - End Note but a lot more included. DOIs should be incorporated into this tool - I couldn’t find any mention of Crossref or DOIs.

And Just Relax

Tony Hammond — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Nice piece of advocacy here by Tim Bray for RELAX. High time to see someone standing up for RELAX - a much friendlier XML schema language.

Journal Supply Chain Efficiency Improvement Pilot

Ed Pentz — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This project - https://web.archive.org/web/20061004011422/www.journalsupplychain.com/ - (which needs a new name or clever acronym) has released a Mid Year Report. The pilot is being extended into 2007 and there is clearly value for publishers in having an unique ID for institutions at the licensing unit level. Ringgold, one of the project partners, has a great database with a validated hierarchy of institutions from consortia down to departments - I had a demo at Frankfurt. The report has some info on benefits for publishers and on possible business models. I think a central, neutral registry of unique IDs would be a real benefit to the industry.

From the report:

“Publishers

Certainly publishers are already using an institutional identifier internally with major

marketing and customer communication benefits. The main areas where the proposed

identifier could add value to the communication between the publisher and customer

should be in areas such as:

• accurate COUNTER usage reports

• institutional renewals being unrecognized as such and therefore appearing as

new subscriptions

• easier ability to track institutional end-users of consolidated subscriptions

(especially those where the agent does not deliver orders via ICEDIS

structured FTP with Type 2 addresses incorporated in the complete record)”

On business models:

“A sensible business model would have those that receive the most economic benefit

from a respective service providing a respective level of funding to support costs. It is

clear that publishers are the primary beneficiaries of the institutional identifier, with

clear benefits, thereby suggesting they should bear the proportionate cost. Ultimately

the subscriber pays anyway; economies are reflected in reduced cost to the subscriber

in a competitive market.

Other participants would see service improvements, but not the same clear benefits. It

would therefore be reasonable to ask the publishers to bear the major cost of the

establishment of such an identifier, and to a certain extent they have already done so

by subscribing selectively to Ringgold’s existing auditing and database services.

The various and relevant business revenue streams might be reflected as follows:

• Free service: limited search only, with number of searches per day restricted,

possibility of searchers to edit or input information using a “response form”

designed for such purposes

• Basic subscription: unlimited search access to the database

• Database license for hosting services: download of standard selected metadata

• Database license for publishers: access for download of selected metadata, and

automatic receipt of alerts for changes”

Ruby Makes A-List

Tony Hammond — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Um, well. Seems according to O’Reilly Ruby that Ruby is now a mainstream language.

“The Ruby programming language just made the A-list on the TIOBE Programming Community Index, and Ruby is now listed as a mainstream programming language. For the past three or four years Ruby has consistently placed in the high 20’s in this index, but is now placed as the 13th most popular programming language!”

(No language wars, but I am, I will confess, a big admirer - for some time.)

STIX and Stones

Crossref — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The STIX Fonts project funded by six major publishers to develop a comprehensive font set for STM publishing has completed its development phase and is about to move into beta testing (planned to commence in late October). Participation is open to all publishers - so now is the time to get involved to ensure your needs are met by this significant activity.

AdsML

Tony Hammond — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A new version of the AdsML Framework 2.0, Release 8 from the AdsML Consortium is now available for download from http://www.adsml.org/2006/announcements/adsml-framework-2-0-release-8-issued/.

Below is an extract from the “Vision” document which outlines the broad goals of AdsML.

_“2 The Vision of AdsML

According to its Charter document, the mission of the AdsML Consortium is 3-

fold:

• to create an internationally-adopted set of specifications and associated

business processes for the electronic exchange of business information and

content for advertising

• to simplify and accelerate business interactions

• to facilitate use across multiple media in both current and future

environments.

This dry, somewhat technical statement masks the simplicity and power of what

the AdsML Consortium aims to do. Stated informally, AdsML’s vision is to tie

together all of the parties involved in producing, booking, distributing

and publishing an ad as if they all used the same software system – but

without actually requiring everyone to switch to a different software system or

vendor.”_

Blogs, Well Duh!

Tony Hammond — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Rubel has a reponse here to Lexis-Nexis’ survey on consumers preferred outlets for breaking news and their rubbishing of blogs as a credible publishing forum. It’s something called, er, the Long Tail by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine.

Couple Web Feeds to Note

Tony Hammond — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry to be somewhat backwards, but just in case any folks didn’t already know there’s a couple new feeds set up recently (or at least they’re newish to me 🙂

News from STM (from the STM Association)
- eFoundations (from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston at Eduserv Foundation in the UK)

Science Commons

Tony Hammond — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Murray-Rust posts on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list about a Commons for Science Conference (Oct. 3/4 in DC). The meeting is invitation-only but the papers are online (see here) and there should be public reports. The meeting underlines the importance of Open Data. There’s a brief abstract below.

_“The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by

developments in electronic storage and computational capability,

scientific inquiry today is becoming more data-intensive in almost

every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics,

medicine, ecology, or high-energy physics, modern research depends on

the availability of multiple databases, drawn from multiple public

and private sources; and the ability of those diverse databases to be

searched, recombined, and processed.”_

CrossTech

Tony Hammond — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

<span >Just a couple comments about CrossTech:

<span >1. Shouldn’t it (or couldn’t it) be linked to from the Crossref home page? (This is a public read list after all and so should be made more widely available.) Maybe at some point could be announced on some lists of interest.

<span >2. Would be very nice to (at least) have a count of membership. I would also like to canvas opinions about making names of the membership public. What do others think about this?

<span >At the end of the day though this facility needs to be driven, otherwise it will end up being just another pier over the water (i.e. a ‘disappointed bridge’ And sorry for cribbing again from JAJ).

Wiley Does RSS, Too!

Tony Hammond — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post blogged by Rafael Sidi at EEI. Wiley are now dishing out RSS feeds. And moreover from a cursory inspection (see e.g. here for the American Journal of Human Biology) it seems like they are putting out RSS 1.0 (RDF) and DC/PRISM metadata. Don’t know if there’s anyone from Wiley who can comment on this. But this really is the best news. (Now, who else can we get to join the party. 😉

[Editor’s update: Link to Wiley was broken and removed. January 2021]

ACAP - (Automated Content Access Protocol)

Ed Pentz — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The World Association of Newspapers is developing ACAP - see the press release which will be machine readable rights information that search engines would read and act on in an automated way. Rightscom is working on the project and the IPA and EPC (European Publishers Council) are involved.

Publishers presenting a united front to search engines is a good thing but I’m somewhat skeptical about how such a system would work without being overly complicated. However, the idea of getting more information to the search engines when they are crawling sites is a good idea but what will the publishers say to the search engines? If you get much above crawl/don’t crawl then you need a bilateral agreement that has to be negotiated.

PRISM Use Cases

Tony Hammond — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

At last week’s PRISM Face to Face meeting at Time Inc. (NY), Linda Burman raised the question of how (STM) publishers were using PRISM beyond RSS. I gave a brief presentation of how we at Nature were using PRISM: RSS (well you all know about that), Connotea (our social bookmarking tool), SRU (Search/Retrieve by URL), and OTMI (Open Text Mining Interface - which we’ll shortly be making available for wider comment). Be interested to learn if anyone else is using PRISM in other ways.

password control

Ed Pentz — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve taken the top level access control off the site. This means that anyone can read the blog but posting will be limited to those with an account (Crossref members and invited participants). This will make it possible to include the CrossTech feed in your regular RSS reader/aggregator. We’ll soon be posting some general terms and conditions for this blog and also sending a message to all Crossref members about joining so we should see membership (and activity) pick up.

Embedding standardized metadata in HTML

Ed Pentz — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On the iSpecies blog Rod Page describes how he extracts DOIs from Google Scholar results - he does use the Crossref OpenURL interface and Connotea to get DOIs too. He also says “DOIs are pretty cool” which is good!

On another blog post to SemAnt Page describes how he uses LSIDs and DOIs for Ant literature.

It seems that there is more and more of this type of use of the DOI so its great we have the OpenURL interface. Could the type of stuff that Page is doing be helped by publishers embedding metadata in their HTML pages? This could include licensing info and information for search engine crawlers.

Ingenta and BMC embed metadata (are there others?) - here is a snippet from a BMC article -

<cc:Work rdf:about="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/3/16">
<cc:license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/"/>
</cc:Work>
<cc:License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">
<cc:permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"/>
<cc:permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"/>
<cc:requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice"/>
<cc:requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"/>
<cc:permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/DerivativeWorks"/>
</cc:License>
<item rdf:about="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/3/16">
<title>Inter-familial relationships of the shorebirds (Aves: Charadriiformes) based on nuclear DNA sequence data</title>
<dc:title>Inter-familial relationships of the shorebirds (Aves: Charadriiformes) based on nuclear DNA sequence data</dc:title>
<dc:creator>Ericson, Per GP</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Envall, Ida</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Irestedt, Martin</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Norman, Janette A</dc:creator>
<dc:identifier>info:doi/10.1186/1471-2148-3-16</dc:identifier>
<dc:identifier>info:pmid/12875664</dc:identifier>
<dc:source>BMC Evolutionary Biology 2003, 3:16</dc:source>
<dc:date>2003-07-23</dc:date>
<prism:publicationName>BMC Evolutionary Biology</prism:publicationName>
<prism:publicationDate>2003-07-23</prism:publicationDate>
<prism:volume>3</prism:volume>
<prism:number>1</prism:number>
<prism:section>Research article</prism:section>
<prism:startingPage>16</prism:startingPage>
</item>
</rdf:RDF>

password control

Ed Pentz — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

At the moment a username and password is needed to read the CrossTech blog in addition to needing an account to post entries. However, it may be better to take off the access control to read the blog - this would mean that services like Technorati and Google could index the blog, which they can’t do at the moment and posting to the blog would be public.

As people come on to the list maybe the first thing to comment on is whether we should take off the access control to read the blog. What to people think?

SEMANTIC WEB: GOOGLE HAS THE ANSWERS, BUT NOT THE QUESTIONS

Ed Pentz — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Posted by special permission from EPS

EPS INSIGHTS :: 01/08/2006

SEMANTIC WEB: GOOGLE HAS THE ANSWERS, BUT NOT THE QUESTIONS

The Google v. Semantic Web discussion at the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) featured plenty of confrontation and even some rational argument, but it may chiefly be remembered as the day when Google responded to the challenge of semantic web thinking by saying that the semantic web movement did not matter - thereby demonstrating that it did.

by David Worlock, Chairman

And we thought that the real battle this year was between net neutrality and the network owners. Or between those who think that click fraud crucially undermines Google, and those who think it doesn’t matter. We were wrong. July’s “Thrilla in Manila” was the discussion between Tim Berners-Lee and the Google Director of Search, Peter Norvig, at the Boston AAAI meeting. And it is an important moment because Berners-Lee’s assertion that the last semantic web building blocks are moving into place comes at exactly the time when Google seems anxious to diminish semantic web searching. It is a good guess that the latter results from a stimulus dictated by threat. A world where keyword searching was reduced to ground floor in a building of many storeys where it may even be an advantage to be a new market entrant with no history is a world where Google would have to progressively re-invent itself. And what is more difficult, in the recent history of these things, than a company created by a technology re-inventing itself in terms of a new technology?

So Google’s Boston blows were first of all aimed at the reality test. Like STM publishers pointing to the unlikelihood of academic researchers adding metadata to articles for repository filing, Google pointed to user and webmaster incompetence as the chief reason why semantic interoperability was doomed to a long, slow and painful generative process. If users cannot configure a server or write HTML, how can they understand all this stuff? And then suppliers would slow it down by trying to make it proprietary. And then, machine to machine interoperability would encourage deception (obviously the click fraud business is hurting). The answer to the Semantic Web, from a Google stance, thus appears to be: very interesting, but not very soon.

Dancing like a bee and stinging like a butterfly, Tim Berners-Lee clearly had the answers to this. The reason why the semantic web appears threatening to those who have entrenched tenancies in search is probably because it is going quicker than expected. His original ‘layer cake’ diagram, a feature on the conference circuit for five years, could now be completed at all levels. RDF as a data language is now well-established (think of RSS). Ontologies, mostly in narrow vertical domains, are moving into place, though there may be issues about relating them to each other. Query and rules languages now populate the other layers, with one of the former, SPARQL, emerging this year as a W3C candidate recommendation (6 April 2006). In a real sense this is the missing link which makes the Semantic Web a viable proposition, and at the same time joins it to the popular hubbub around Web 2.0. If part of the latter dream is data sourcing from a wide variety of service entities to create new web environments from composite content, then SPARQL sitting on top of RDF looks closest to realising that idea. In an important note in O’Reilly XML.com (SPARQL: Web 2.0 Meet the Semantic Web; 16 September 2005), Kendall Clark wrote “Imagine having one query language, and one client, that lets you arbitrarily slice the data of Flickr, del.icio.us, Google, and your three other favourite Web 2.0 sites, all FOAF files, all of the RSS 1.0 feeds (and, eventually, I suspect, all Atom 1.0 feeds) plus MusicBrainz etc”.

Imagining that might well impel you into the ring with Tim Berners-Lee. If Google has to be re-invented, the process of recognition of change has to be slowed. Denying the speedy reality of the semantic web becomes essential while furious R&D takes place. And content and information service providers are not just spectators of this, but participants too.

Welcome to CrossTech

Ed Pentz — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to CrossTech, a new access-controlled blog to discuss developments in the online scholarly publishing world. Crossref’s mission is to foster dialogue and information sharing among publishers to enable innovation and collaboration. In order to do things collaboratively, publishers need to share information and communicate in an appropriate manner that takes into account anti-trust and competitive issues. The online publishing world changes quickly and many developments are driven by organisations outside of scholarly publishing so CrossTech provides publishers a “protected” space to discuss issues.

Nature Publishing Group’s Xanadu blog is the model for CrossTech. Our hope is that CrossTech will build on the idea of Xanadu.

CrossTech Objectives: To provide a neutral forum where participants can post and discuss technical issues, link to relevant items on the Internet, make others aware of important developments and share and learn from each others’ experiences. CrossTech will promote collaboration and innovation among publishers in an appropriate manner taking account of anti-trust and competitive issues.

The main goals of CrossTech are:

To provide a common forum for discussing new publishing technologies
To develop a publisher technology community
To determine common directions for key publishing technologies
To foster best practices - and decide the best route to codify or standardize those practices
To share experiences
To act as an alerting mechanism for publishers to learn of relevant, new technology developments

Please let us know if you would like to participate. A username and password will be needed to read, post and comment. To obtain a username and password to post and comment, please email Anna Tolwinska annat@crossref.org.

We look forward to having you participate!