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[See this link if you’re short on time: facets search client. Only tested on Firefox at this point. Caveat: At time of writing the Crossref Metadata Search was being very slow but was still functional. Previously it was just slow.] Following on from Geoff’s announcement last month of a prototype Crossref Metadata OpenSearch on labs.crossref.org, I wanted to show what typical OpenSearch responses might look like in a more mature implementation.

Following on from my recent post about our shiny new nature.com OpenSearch service we just put up a cheatsheet for users. I’m posting about this here as this may also be of interest especially to those exploring how SRU and OpenSearch intersect. The cheatsheet can be downloaded from our nature.com OpenSearch test page and is available in two forms: Cheatsheet (PDF, 65K) Cheatsheet (PNG, 141K) Naurally, all comments welcome.

We’re pleased to announce that a Crossref working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds. Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one <dc:creator> element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.

The other day Noel O’Boyle wrote to tell me that he had updated the Ubiquity plug-in that we had developed in order to to make it work with the latest version of Firefox. The problem was, I had *also* updated the Ubiquity plug-in, but I hadn’t really indicated to anybody how they could find updates to the plug-in. /me=embarrassed. So it seemed time to provide a home for some of the prototypes and experiments that we’ve been developing at Crossref.

(Click panels in figure to read related posts.) Following up on my earlier posts here about the structured search technologies OpenSearch and SRU, I wanted to reference three recent posts on our web publishing blog Nascent which discuss our new nature.com OpenSearch service: 1. Service Describes the new nature.com OpenSearch service which provides a structured resource discovery facility for content hosted on nature.com. 2. Clients Points to a small gallery of demo web clients for nature.

Crossref Technical Meeting* The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA Monday, November 9th, 2009 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Please register today! We also encourage you to register for our 10th Anniversary Celebration Dinner, which will take place Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm following the Crossref Technical Meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Transportation from the Charles Hotel to the Museum of Science will be provided. Our 2009 Annual Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 10th at 9:00 am in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA and we urge you to register soon (if you haven’t already done so)

OK, so this has nothing to do with any Crossref projects- but there is an interesting new PRC report out by Mark Ware in which he explores how SMEs (small/medium-sized enterprises) make use of scholarly articles and whether the scholarly publishing industry is doing anything to make their lives easier. This is a topic that is close to my heart. For the past few years I’ve been saying (most recently at SSP09) that I think scholarly publishers are much too quick to dismiss the possibility of creating an iTunes-like service for scholarly publications (aka “iPub”).

We are looking to hire an R&D Developer in our Oxford offices. We are look for somebody who: Is passionate about creating tools for online scholarly communication. Relishes working with metadata. Has experience delivering web-based applications using agile methodologies. Wants to learn new skills and work with a variety of programming languages. Enjoys working with a small, geographically dispersed team. Groks mixed-content model XML. Groks RDF. Groks REST. Has explored MapReduce-based database systems.

Allen Renear and Carole Palmer have just published an article titled “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing” in the current issue of Science (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784). I’m particularly happy to see this paper published because I actually got to witness the genesis of these ideas in my living room back in 2006. Since then, Allen and Carole’s ideas have profoundly influenced my thinking on the application of technology to scholarly communication.

In an earlier post I talked about using the PAM (PRISM Aggregator Message) schema for an SRU result set. I have also noted in another post that a Search Web Service could support both SRU and OpenSearch interfaces. This does then beg the question of what a corresponding OpenSearch result set might look like for such a record. Based on the OpenSearch spec and also on a new Atom extension for SRU, I have contrived to show how a PAM record might be returned in a coomon OpenSearch format.