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First off, a Happy New Year to all! A post of mine to the OpenURL list may possibly be of interest. Following up the recent W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) Finding on “The Use of Metadata in URIs” I pointed out that the TAG do not seem to be aware of OpenURL: which is both a standard prescription for including metadata in URI strings and a US information standard to boot.

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?

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…

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.

Nice piece of advocacy here by Tim Bray for RELAX. High time to see someone standing up for RELAX - a much friendlier XML schema language.

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.

Um, well. Seems according to O’Reilly Ruby that Ruby is now a mainstream language. “The Ruby programming language just made the A-list on the TIOBE Programming Community Index, and Ruby is now listed as a mainstream programming language. For the past three or four years Ruby has consistently placed in the high 20’s in this index, but is now placed as the 13th most popular programming language!” (No language wars, but I am, I will confess, a big admirer - for some time.

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.

A new version of the AdsML Framework 2.0, Release 8 from the AdsML Consortium is now available for download from http://www.adsml.org/2006/announcements/adsml-framework-2-0-release-8-issued/.

Below is an extract from the “Vision” document which outlines the broad goals of AdsML.