Blog

Due to spam the comments and trackbacks were turned off on the blog since last week. Comments can be moderated so they have now been turned back on. Glad to see postings picking up.

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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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