Blog

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.

At last week’s PRISM Face to Face meeting at Time Inc. (NY), Linda Burman raised the question of how (STM) publishers were using PRISM beyond RSS. I gave a brief presentation of how we at Nature were using PRISM: RSS (well you all know about that), Connotea (our social bookmarking tool), SRU (Search/Retrieve by URL), and OTMI (Open Text Mining Interface - which we’ll shortly be making available for wider comment).

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.

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

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.