Collaboration

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. Ringgold, one of the project partners, has a great database with a validated hierarchy of institutions from consortia down to departments - I had a demo at Frankfurt. The report has some info on benefits for publishers and on possible business models. I think a central, neutral registry of unique IDs would be a real benefit to the industry.

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). Be interested to learn if anyone else is using PRISM in other ways.