So here’s a couple of interesting follow ups from the meeting.
ps. If you want to know more about CrossRef, make sure you take a look at their website and in particular the labs section: http://labs.crossref.org/.

Opening up article level metrics

http://det.labs.crossref.org/

CrossRef is using the open source Lagotto application (developed by PLOS https://github.com/articlemetrics/lagotto) to retrieve article metrics data from a variety of sources (e.g. wikipedia, twitter etc. see the full list here).

The model used for storing this data follows an agreed ontology containing for example a classification of ‘mentions’ actions (viewed/saved/discussed/recommended/cited – see this paper for more details).

In a nutshell, CrossRef is planning to collect and make the metrics (raw) data for all the DOIs they track in the form of ‘DOI events‘

An interesting demo application shows the stream of DOIs citations coming from Wikipedia (one of the top referrers of DOIs, unsurprisingly). More discussions on this blog post.

Linking dataset DOIs and publications DOIs

http://www.crosscite.org/

CrossRef has been working with Datacite to the goal of harmonising their databases. Datacite is the second major register of DOIs (after CrossRef) and it has been focusing on assigning persistent identifiers to datasets.

This work is now gaining more momentum as Datacite is enlarging its team. So in theory it won’t be long before we see a service that allows to interlink publications and datasets, which is great news.

Linking publications and funding sources

http://www.crossref.org/fundref/

FundRef provides a standard way to report funding sources for published scholarly research. This is increasingly becoming a fundamental requirement for all publicly funded research, so several publishers have agreed to help extracting funding information and sending it to CrossRef.

A recent platform built on top of Fundref is Chorus http://www.chorusaccess.org/, which enables users to discover articles reporting on funded research. Furthermore it provides dashboards which can b used by funders, institutions, researchers, publishers, and the public for monitoring and tracking public-access compliance for articles reporting on funded research.

For example see http://dashboard.chorusaccess.org/ahrq#/breakdown

Miscellaneous news & links

– JSON-LD (an RDF version of JSON) is being considered as a candidate data format for the next generation of the CrossRef REST API.

– The prototype http://www.yamz.net/ came up in discussion; a quite interesting stack-overflow meets ontology-engineering kind of tool. Def worth a look, I’d say.

– Wikidata (a queryable structured data version of wikipedia) seems to be gaining a lot of momentum after it’s taken over Freebase from Google. Will it eventually replace its main rival DBpedia?

In the last months I’ve been working with my colleagues at Macmillan Science and Education on an open data portal that makes available to the public many of the taxonomies and ontologies we use internally for organising the content we publish.

This is part of our ongoing involvement with linked data and semantic technologies, aimed both at leveraging these tools to the end of transforming the publishing workflow into a more dynamic platform, and at contributing to the evolving web of open data with a rich dataset of scientific articles metadata.

The articles dataset includes metadata about all articles published by the Nature journal, of course. But not only: the Scientific American, Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics and many other titles are also part of it (note: the full list can be downloaded as raw data here).

The first diagram shows how many articles have been published each year since 1845 (the start year of Scientific American). Nature began only a few years later in 1869; the curve getting steeper in the 90s instead corresponds to the exponential increase in publications due to the progressive specialisation of scientific journals (e.g. all the nature-branded titles).

The second diagram instead shows the increase in publication volumes on an incremental scale. We’ve now reached the 1M articles and counting!

In order to create the charts I played around with a nifty example from Mike Bostock (http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3902569) and added a couple of extra things to it.

The full source code is on Github.

Finally, worth mentioning that this metadata had already been made available a few of years ago under the CC0 license: you can still access it here. This upcoming release though makes it available in the context of a much more precise and stable set of ontologies. Meaning that the semantics of the dataset is more clearly laid out and consistent.

So stay tuned for more! ..and if you plan/would like to reuse these datasets please do get in touch, either here of by emailing developers@nature.com.

Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology. [About Force 11]

Rather than the presentations, I would say that the most valuable aspect of this event are the many conversations you can have with people from different backgrounds: techies, publishers, policy makers, academics etc..

Nonetheless, here’s a (very short and biased) list of things that seemed to stand out.

This presentation describes my recent work in semantic analysis of the acknowledgement section of biomedical research articles, specifically the sharing of resources (instruments, reagents, model organisms, etc.) between the author articles and other non-author investigators. The resulting semantic graph complements the knowledge currently captured by research profiling systems, which primarily focus on investigators, publications and grants. My approach results in much finer-grained information, at the individual author contribution level, and the specific resources shared by external parties. The long-term goal for this work is unification with the VIVO-ISF-based CTSAsearch federated search engine, which currently contains research profiles from 60 institutions worldwide.

I argue that it is precisely the ubiquitous use of attachments that has held up progress in publishing. We have the technology right now to allow the author to write online and have the file saved automatically as XML. All subsequent work on the “manuscript” (e.g. copy editing, QC, etc) can also be done online. At the end of the process the XML is automatically “rendered” to PDF, Epub, etc, and delivered to the end user, on demand. This system is quicker as there are no emails or attachments to hold it up, cheaper as there is no admin involved, and more accurate as there is only one definitive file (the XML) which is the “format of record”.

If you want more, it’s worth taking a look directly at the conference agenda and in particular the demo/poster session agenda. And hopefully see you next year in Portland, Oregon :-)