I was invited to speak at the Handle System Workshop which was run back to back with an IDF Open Meeting earlier this week in Brussels and hosted at the Office for Official Publications of the European Union.

A Crossref Member Briefing is available that explains how PubMed Central (PMC) links to publisher full text, how PMC uses DOIs and how PMC should be using DOIs.

Interesting post from Yahoo! Search’s Director of Product Management, Priyank Garg, “ One Standard Fits All: Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft “. Interesting also for what it doesn’t talk about. No mention here of ACAP.

As the range of public services (e.g. RSS) offered by publishers has matured this gives rise to the question: How can they expose their public data so that a user may discover them? Especially, with DOI there is now in place a persistence link infrastructure for accessing primary content. How can publishers leverage that infrastructure to advantage?

(Click to enlarge.) For infotainment only (and because it’s a pretty printing). Glimpse into the dark world of DOI. Here, the handle contents for doi:10.1038/nature06930 exposed as a standard OpenHandle ‘Hello World’ document. Browser image courtesy of Processing.js and Firefox 3 RC1.

So, why is it just so difficult to reference OpenURL? Apart from the standard itself (hardly intended for human consumption - see abstract page here and PDF and don’t even think to look at those links - they weren’t meant to be cited!), seems that the best reference is to the Wikipedia page. There is the OpenURL Registry page at http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets but this is just a workshop.

So, the big guns have decided that XRI is out. In a message from the TAG yesterday, variously noted as being “categorical” (Andy Powell, eFoundations) and a “proclamation” (Edd Dumbill, XML.com), the co-chairs (Tim Berners-Lee and Stuart Williams) had this to say: Alas, poor XRI.

Following on from yesterday’s post about making metadata available on our Web pages, I wanted to ask here about “metadata reuse policies”. Does anybody have a clue as to what might constitute a best practice in this area? I’m specifically interested in license terms, rather than how those terms would be encoded or carried.

Well, we may not be the first but wanted anyway to report that Nature has now embedded metadata (HTML meta tags) into all its newly published pages including full text, abstracts and landing pages (all bar four titles which are currently being worked on). Metadata coverage extends back through the Nature archives (and depth of coverage varies depending on title). This conforms to the W3C’s Guideline 13.2 in the Web Content Accessibility

Further to my previous post “NIH Mandate and PMCIDs” we’ve been looking into linking to articles on publishers’ sites from PubMed Central (PMC). There are a couple of ways this happens currently (see details below) but these are complicated and will lead to broken links and more difficulty for PMC and publishers in managing the links. Crossref is going to be putting together a briefing note for its members on this soon.

Following up the earlier post on OpenHandle, there are now a number of language examples which have been contributed to the project. The diagram below shows the OpenHandle service in schematic with various languages support. Briefly, OpenHandle aims to provide a web services interface to the Handle System to simplify access to the data stored for a given Handle.