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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.

Steve Rubel has a reponse here to Lexis-Nexis’ survey on consumers preferred outlets for breaking news and their rubbishing of blogs as a credible publishing forum. It’s something called, er, the Long Tail by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine.

Sorry to be somewhat backwards, but just in case any folks didn’t already know there’s a couple new feeds set up recently (or at least they’re newish to me 🙂 News from STM (from the STM Association) eFoundations (from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston at Eduserv Foundation in the UK)

Peter Murray-Rust posts on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list about a Commons for Science Conference (Oct. 3/4 in DC). The meeting is invitation-only but the papers are online (see here) and there should be public reports. The meeting underlines the importance of Open Data. There’s a brief abstract below.

<span >Just a couple comments about CrossTech: <span >1. Shouldn’t it (or couldn’t it) be linked to from the Crossref home page? (This is a public read list after all and so should be made more widely available.) Maybe at some point could be announced on some lists of interest. <span >2. Would be very nice to (at least) have a count of membership. I would also like to canvas opinions about making names of the membership public.

This post blogged by Rafael Sidi at EEI. Wiley are now dishing out RSS feeds. And moreover from a cursory inspection (see e.g. here for the American Journal of Human Biology) it seems like they are putting out RSS 1.0 (RDF) and DC/PRISM metadata. Don’t know if there’s anyone from Wiley who can comment on this. But this really is the best news. (Now, who else can we get to join the party.