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I just posted this entry on Nascent, Nature’s Web Publishing blog, about Nature’s new look for web feeds which essentially boils down to our using the RSS 1.0 ‘mod_content’ module to add in a rich content description for human consumption to complement our long-standing commitment to machine-readable descriptions. We are thus able to deliver full citation details in our RSS feeds as XHTML in CDATA sections for humans and as DC/PRISM properties for machines, the whole encoded in our feed format of choice - RSS 1.

Leigh Dodds proposes in this post some solutions to persistent linking using web crawlers and social bookmarking. “When I use del.icio.us, CiteULike, or Connotea or other social bookmarking service, I end up bookmarking the URL of the site I’m currently using. Its this specific URL that goes into their database and associated with user-assigned tags, etc. … A more generally applicable approach to addressing this issue, one that is not specific to academic publishing, would be to include, in each article page, embedded metadata that indicates the preferred bookmark link.

IOP has created an instance of the arXiv repository called eprintweb.org at https://web.archive.org/web/20130803071935/http://eprintweb.org/S/. What’s the difference from arXiv? From the eprinteweb.org site - “We have focused on your experience as a user, and have addressed issues of navigation, searching, personalization and presentation, in order to enhance that experience. We have also introduced reference linking across the entire content, and enhanced searching on all key fields, including institutional address.”

The site looks very good and it’s interesting to see a publisher developing a service directly engaging with a repository.

In light of my earlier post on OTMI, the mail copied below from Sebastian Hammer at Index Data about open content may be of interest. They are looking to compile a listing of web sources of open content - see this page for further details.

(Via XML4lib and other lists.)

We’ve just posted an update about OTMI (the Open Text Mining Interface) on our Web Publishing blog Nascent. This post details the following changes: Contact email - otmi@nature.com Wiki - http://opentextmining.org/ Repository - https://web.archive.org/web/20090706181310/http://www.nature.com/otmi/journals.opml The OTMI content repository currently provides two years’ worth of full text across five of our titles: Nature Nature Genetics Nature Reviews Drug Discovery Nature Structural & Molecular Biology The Pharmacogenomics Journal See the wiki for draft technical specs and for a sample script to generate the OTMI files.

Just in case anybody may not have seen this, here‘s the testimony of Sir Tim Berners-Lee yesterday before a House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Required reading. (Via this post yesterday in the Save the Internet blog.)

There’s a great exposition of FRBR (the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records model “work -> expression -> manifestation -> item“) in this post from The FRBR Blog on De Revolutionibus as described in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich. See post for the background and here (103 KB PNG) for a map of the FRBR relationships. (Yes, and a twinkly star in the title too.

Not specifically publishing-related, but here is a fun rant interview with Alan Kay titled The PC Must Be Revamped—Now. My favorite bit… “…in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It’s unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn’t anything to learn from the past, so most people haven’t gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought.

Update: All apologies to Google. Apparently this was a problem at our end which our IT folks are currently investigating. (And I thought it was just me. 🙂 Just managed to get this page: _“Google Error We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon.

The info registry has now added in the InChI namespace (see registry entry here) which now means that chemical compounds identified by InChIs (IUPAC‘s International Chemical Identifiers) are expressible in URI form and thus amenable to many Web-based description technologies that use URI as the means to identify objects, e.g. XLink, RDF, etc. As an example, the InChI identifier for naphthalene is InChI=1/C10H8/c1-2-6-10-8-4-3-7-9(10)5-1/h1-8H and can now be legitimately expressed in URI form as