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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

Just a couple comments about CrossTech: 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. 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. What do others think about this?

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.

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.