CrossTech

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 element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.

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.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 6:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The other day Noel O'Boyle wrote to tell me that he had updated the Ubiquity plug-in that we had developed in order to to make it work with the latest version of Firefox. The problem was, I had *also* updated the Ubiquity plug-in, but I hadn't really indicated to anybody how they could find updates to the plug-in. /me=embarrassed.

So it seemed time to provide a home for some of the prototypes and experiments that we've been developing at CrossRef. To that end, we have created a CrossRef Labs site. Here you can find links to various tools and services that either make it easier to use CrossRef services (e.g. Blog/Ubiquity plugins and OpenSearch Description files) or that serve to illustrate a concept that has been of interest to our members (InChI lookup, TOI-DOIs). Oh, yeah- and when we update these experiments, you should be able to find the updates on their respective pages. Sorry about that Noel...

Finally, I will quote from the CrossRef Labs home page:

"Most of the experiments linked to here are running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment. They may disappear without warning and/or perform erratically. If one of them isn't working for some reason, come back later and try again."

Have fun.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

CrossRef Technical Meeting*
The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
Monday, November 9th, 2009
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Please register today!

We also encourage you to register for our 10th Anniversary Celebration Dinner, which will take place Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm following the CrossRef Technical Meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Transportation from the Charles Hotel to the Museum of Science will be provided. Our 2009 Annual Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 10th at 9:00 am in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA and we urge you to register soon (if you haven't already done so)
as space is limited. You may register for both events here.

*Please note that this year's Technical Meeting will be on Monday afternoon.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We are looking to hire an R&D Developer in our Oxford offices. We are look for somebody who:

• Is passionate about creating tools for online scholarly communication.
• Relishes working with metadata.
• Has experience delivering web-based applications using agile methodologies.
• Wants to learn new skills and work with a variety of programming languages.
• Enjoys working with a small, geographically dispersed team.
• Groks mixed-content model XML.
• Groks RDF.
• Groks REST.
• Has explored MapReduce-based database systems.
• Is expert in one or more popular development language (Java, C, C++, C#).
• Is expert in one or more popular scripting language (Ruby, Python, Javascript).
• Has deployed and maintained Linux/BSD-based systems.
• Understands relational databases (MySQL, Postgres, Oracle).
• Tests first.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 3:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef is hiring an R&D software engineer to work in our Oxford office. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on wide range of projects that promise to revolutionize scholarly publishing.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 5:31 AM | Permalink

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.

Continue reading "CrossRef Citation Plugin (for WordPress)" »

Posted by at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 backfile 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").

Posted by Ed Pentz at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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...

Posted by at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Zotero 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.

Posted by Ed Pentz at 4:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This project - http://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.

Continue reading "Journal Supply Chain Efficiency Improvement Pilot" »

Posted by Ed Pentz at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Eamonn Neylon at 3:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Ed Pentz at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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 organizations outside of scholarly publishing so CrossTech provides publishers a "protected" space to discuss issues.

Continue reading "Welcome to CrossTech" »

Posted by Ed Pentz at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)