Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers
We're pleased to announce that a CrossRef working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds.
Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one
The recommendations intended to facilitate good practice in the production and provision of TOC RSS Feeds. The guidelines include general recommendations for good practice, specific recommendations on the use of RSS Modules and an example RSS TOC feed. Ultimately, we expect that industry wide adoption of these best practices will help drive more traffic to publisher web sites. Note that most of these recommendation can also be applied to non-TOC RSS feeds such as thematic feeds, automated search result feeds, etc.
Comments
I take the liberty to point to a Chemistry module that was published recently:
Murray-Rust P, Rzepa HS, Williamson MJ, Willighagen EL. Chemical markup, XML, and the World Wide Web. 5. Applications of chemical metadata in RSS aggregators.
J Chem Inf Comput Sci. 2004 Mar-Apr;44(2):462-9.
Posted by: Egon Willighagen | October 20, 2009 05:42 AM
Thanks for this. One of the things we wanted to get into this release was recommendations on how to create dicipline-specific extensions to RSS feeds (e.g. InChis, etc.). Ultimately we decided to get this out as-is and come out with a revision ASAP.
Posted by: Geoffrey Bilder | October 20, 2009 05:47 AM
Hi Geoff:
This is great news and of course we'll be wanting to cite this from our help pages for both internal and external users.
Are there any plans for CrossRef to assign a persistent identifier to this? Would this in fact merit a CrossRef assigned DOI?
I am interested to know just what kind of *value* CrossRef would place on a best practices technical document like this that it has developed. We know that other standards settings organizations (IETF, W3C, OASIS) have clearly defined numbering schemes for their documents. Would CrossRef have similar ideas for any projected series of its recommendations or are they just to be taken "as is"?
Cheers,
Tony
Posted by: Tony Hammond | October 21, 2009 06:34 AM