CrossTech

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).

And of course I was mildly exasperated by the report's characterization of one of the perceived "disadvantages" of the CrossRef architectural model being a :

"Centralised service hosting a large persistent store – with the need for a (possibly commercial) business model to justify providing the service."

Though DOI registries like Bowker and Nielsen Bookdata are commercial, CrossRef, the organization that services the industry that the JISC is concerned with, is *not* a commercial service.

Also if you replaced the phrase "justify providing" with the word "sustain", the sentence wouldn't sound like such a "disadvantage."

But aside from these quibbles, the report makes an interesting (if technical) read.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 03:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent popular interest in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at CrossRef- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

Continue reading "NLM Blog Citation Guidelines" »

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The first thing to note is that this demo (the Acrobat plugin) is an application. And that comes with its own baggage, i.e. this is a Windows only plugin and is targeted at Acrobat Reader 8. On a wider purview the application merely bridges an identifier embedded in the media file and the handle record filed against that identifier and delivers some relevant functionality. The data (or metadata) declared in the PDF and in the associated handle if rich enough and structured openly can also be used by other applications. I think this is a key point worth bearing in mind, that the demo besides showing off new functionalities is also demonstrating how data (or metadata) can be embedded at the respective endpoints (PDF, handle).

Some initial observations follow below.

Continue reading "Handle Plugin: Some Notes" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I posted here about an initial meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical WG back in January. ORE is the "Object Reuse and Exchange" initiative which is aiming to provide a formalism for describing scholarly works as complete units (or packages) of information on the Web using resource maps which would be available from public access points. From a DOI perspective this work is intimately connected with multiple resolution. For further updates on this work, see here for a presentation by Herbert Van de Sompel on OAI-ORE at the OAI5 Workshop (5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication) held a couple weeks back at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

The presentation gives an insight regarding the problem domain in which ORE operates, and in the evolving thinking regarding potential solutions. The presentation was recorded on video and is available for both streaming and download (slides, streaming video, video download).

Note that Michael Nelson of Old Dominion University also presented on behalf of the ORE effort at the recent CNI Task Force Meeting and at the DLF Forum.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was just reminded (thanks, Tim) of the possibility of using a special tag in bookmarking services to tag links to documents of interest to a given community. I think this is a fairly well-established practice. Note that e.g. the OAI-ORE project is using Connotea to bookmark pages of interest and tagging them "oaiore" which can then be easily retrieved using the link http://www.connotea.org/tag/oaiore.

I would suggest that CrossRef members might like to consider using the tag "crosstech" in bookmarking pages about publishing technology, so that the following links might be used to retrieve documents of interest to this readership:

• del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/tag/crosstech
  
• CiteULike - http://www.citeulike.org/tag/crosstech
  
• Connotea - http://www.connotea.org/tag/crosstech
  
• etc.
  

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now proposing the possibility of using machine-readable auto-discovery type links for DOIs of the form

<link rel="bookmark" title="DOI" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1000/1"/>

These LINK tags are placed in the document HEAD section and could be used by crawlers and agents to recognize the work represented by the current document. This sounds like a great idea and we'd like to hear feedback on it.

Concurrently at Nature we have also been considering how best to mark up in a machine-readable way DOIs appearing within a document page BODY. Current thinking is to do something along the following lines:

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">
<abbr title="Digital Object Identifier">doi</abbr>:
<abbr class="uri" id="doi" title="info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">10.1038/nprot.2007.43</abbr>
</a>

which allows the DOI to be presented in the preferred CrossRef citation format (doi:10.1038/nprot.2007.43), to be hyperlinked to the handle proxy server (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.43), and to refer to a validly registered URI form for the DOI (info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43). Again, we would be real interested to hear any opinions on this proposal for inline DOI markup as well as on Leigh's proposal for document-level DOI markup.

(Oh, and btw many congrats to Leigh on his recent promotion to CTO, Ingenta.)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Leigh Dodds proposes in this post some solutions to persistent linking using web crawlers and social bookmarking.

"When I use del.icio.us, CiteULike, or Connotea or other social bookmarking service, I end up bookmarking the URL of the site I'm currently using. Its this specific URL that goes into their database and associated with user-assigned tags, etc.

...

A more generally applicable approach to addressing this issue, one that is not specific to academic publishing, would be to include, in each article page, embedded metadata that indicates the preferred bookmark link. The DOI could again be pressed into service as the preferred bookmarking link."

He's inviting feedback. I'd certainly like to hear what others may think of these suggestions.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jon Udell interviews Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, see his blog entry: "A conversation with Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving". The podcast of the interview is available here.

Interesting to see these kind of subjects beginning to be covered by a respected technology writer like Jon. As he says in his post:

"I have ventured into this confusing landscape because I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with — persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis — are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals. As we project our corporate, professional, and personal identities onto the web, we’ll start to see that the long-term stability of those projections is valuable and worth paying for."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Simon Willison has a great piece here about disambiguating URLs. Best practice on creating and publishing URLs is obviously something of interest to any publisher. See this excerpt from Simon's post:

"Here's a random example, plucked from today's del.icio.us popular. convinceme.net is a new online debating site (tag clouds, gradient fills, rounded corners). It's listed in del.icio.us a total of four times!

Combined that's 433 saves; much more impressive, and more likely to end up at the top of a social sharing sites."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)