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Last year Crossref and DataCite announced support for HTTP content negotiation for DOI names. Today, we are pleased to report further collaboration on the topic. We think it is very important that the two largest DOI Registration Agencies work together in order to provide metadata services to DOI names.

The current implementation is documented in detail at http://citation.crosscite.org/

The documentation explains HTTP content negotiation as implemented by both Registration Agencies and provides a list of supported resource/content/record types.

Just a quick heads-up to say that we’ve had a go at incorporating InChIs and ontology terms into our PDFs with XMP. There isn’t a lot of room in an XMP packet so we’ve had to be a bit particular about what we include.

• InChIs: the bigger the molecule the longer the InChI, so we’ve standardized on the fixed-length InChIKey. This doesn’t mean anything on its own, so we’ve gone the Semantic Web route of including an InChI resolver HTTP URI. Alternatively you can extract the InChIKeys with a regular expression.
• Ontology terms: we’re using HTTP URIs again and pointing to either Open Biomedical Ontology URIs (biology, biomedicine; slashy) or RSC ontology terms (chemistry; hashy). Often the OBO URIs resolve to a specific web page, but for the moment the RSC URIs just point to a large OWL file. Slashy URIs are quite a bit more involved so we’ll have to see what the demand is like.

There’s only about 4K to play with, so it’s only ever going to be a best-of. More detailed article metadata has to go in either a sidecar file, as Tony has pointed out before, or ideally on the article landing page. The example files are here and I’ve posted something with a different slant on the RSC technical blog.

Last week Pablo Fernicola sent me email announcing that Microsoft have finally released a beta of their Word plugin for marking-up manuscripts with the NLM DTD. I say “finally” because we’ve know this was on the way and have been pretty excited to see it. We once even hoped that MS might be able to show the plug-in at the ALPSP session on the NLM DTD, but we couldn’t quite manage it.

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

I just ran across the final report from the CLADDIER project. CLADDIER comes from the JISC and stands for “CITATION, LOCATION, And DEPOSITION IN DISCIPLINE & INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES”. I suspect JISC has an entire department dedicated to creating impossible acronyms (the JISC Acronym Preparation Executive?)

Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community.

I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG’s Measure for Measure seminar last June. I think that, like most proponents of p2p distributed architectures, they massively underestimate the problem of trust in the network. They fully knowledge the problem of linkback spam, but their hand-wavy-solution(tm) of using whitelists just means the system effectively becomes semi-centralized again (you have to have trusted keepers of the whitelists).

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape.

I love the comment an authority:

“Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.”

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick.

Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organisations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works. While researchers might prefer electronic versions of the publications for their day-to-day work, print versions of the same publications seemed to continue to play a critical role as an “awareness tool.” I know that, for this very reason, several NGO/IGOs that I’ve spoken to have despaired of ever ramping down their print operations.

XML:UK is holding a one-day conference entitled titled “Publishing 2.0” at Bletchley Park on Wednesday 25th April 2007. Bletchley Park was the location of the United Kingdom’s main codebreaking establishment during the Second World War and is now a museum (and has a train station!). The event will examine some of the more cutting-edge applications of XML technology to publishing. With keynotes by Sean McGrath and Kate Warlock and a series of must-see presentations, this will be the place to be on the last Wednesday in April.

Not specifically publishing-related, but here is a fun rant interview with Alan Kay titled The PC Must Be Revamped—Now.

My favorite bit…

“…in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It’s unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn’t anything to learn from the past, so most people haven’t gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought. ”

Rob Cornelius has a practical little demo of using Yahoo! pipes against some Ingenta feeds.

Like Tony, I keep experiencing speed/stability problems while accessing pipes so I haven’t yet become a crack-pipes-head.