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Further to my previous post “NIH Mandate and PMCIDs” we’ve been looking into linking to articles on publishers’ sites from PubMed Central (PMC). There are a couple of ways this happens currently (see details below) but these are complicated and will lead to broken links and more difficulty for PMC and publishers in managing the links. Crossref is going to be putting together a briefing note for its members on this soon.

The main issue we are raising with PMC, and that we will encourage publishers to raise too, is why doesn’t PMC just automatically link DOIs? Most of the articles in PMC have DOIs so this would require very little effort from PMC and no effort from publishers and would give readers a perisistent link to the publisher’s version of an article.

Following up the earlier post on OpenHandle, there are now a number of language examples which have been contributed to the project. The diagram below shows the OpenHandle service in schematic with various languages support. Briefly, OpenHandle aims to provide a web services interface to the Handle System to simplify access to the data stored for a given Handle. (Note that the diagram is an HTML imagemap and all elements are “clickable”.

The NIH Public Access Policy says “When citing their NIH-funded articles in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, authors must include the PubMed Central reference number for each article” and the FAQ provides some examples of this: Examples: Varmus H, Klausner R, Zerhouni E, Acharya T, Daar A, Singer P. 2003. PUBLIC HEALTH: Grand Challenges in Global Health. Science 302(5644): 398-399. PMCID: 243493 Zerhouni, EA. (2003) A New Vision for the National Institutes of Health.

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.

Just announced on the handle-info and semantic-web mailing lists is the OpenHandle project on Google Code. This may be of some interest to the DOI community as it allows the handle record underpinning the DOI to be exposed in various common text-based serializations to make the data stored within the records more accessible to Web applications. Initial serializations include RDF/XML, RDF/N3, and JSON. We’d be very interested in receiving feedback on this project - either on this blog or over on the project wiki.

On March 3rd the Open Archives Initiative held a roll out meeting of the first alpha release of the ORE specification (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) . According to Herbert Van de Sompel a beta release is planned for late March / early April and a 1.0 release targeted for September. The presentations focused on the aggregation concepts behind ORE and described an ATOM based implementation. ORE is the second project from the OAI but unlike its sibling PMH it is not exclusively a repository technology.

Following on from my previous post about prism:doi I didn’t mention, or reference, the ongoing ISO work on DOI, Indeed I hadn’t realized that the DOI site now has a status update on the ISO work: _“The DOI® System is currently being standardised through ISO. It is expected that the process will be finalised during 2008. In December 2007 the Working Group for this project approved a final draft as a Committee Draft (standard for voting) which is now being processed by ISO.

The new PRISM spec (v. 2.0) was published this week, see the press release. (Downloads are available here.) This is a significant development as there is support for XMP profiles, to complement the existing XML and RDF/XML profiles. And, as PRISM is one of the major vocabularies being used by publishers, I would urge you all to go take a look at it and to consider upgrading your applications to using it.

From the beginning our OpenURL resolver has had a non standard feature of returning metadata in response to a request instead of redirecting to the referrent. This feature returned one of our older XML formats which is a bit limited as to the fields it contains. Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called ‘UNIXREF”. This was always available to regular queries against the Crossref system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).

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.