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A publisher’s perspective on
standards
Discovery and Access:
Standards and the Information Chain
7 December 2006
Cliff Morgan, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Publishers are interested in …
Standards that help customers to:
• Discover material
• Link to it
• Buy it
• Know what they can do with it
• Be kept up to date about it
• Manage their records
• Use the material
• Assess its value
• Preserve it
Discover material
Metadata:
• Dublin Core – basis of so many other
m/data sets but not used much in raw
form by publishers
• dcterms (TMSFKADCQ) doesn’t seem
to have had much take-up
• OAI-PMH – based on DC
Publishers tend not to be involved with:
• Z39.50
• METS
• MODS
• Metasearch
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Enhances access to e-print archives
Neutral regarding business model
Authors not using much
Publishers could target harvesters
ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange) –
brought to you by the same people
• Allows distributed repositories to exchange
info about their constituent digital objects
Link to material
• CrossRef – based on m/data and id
(DOI) standards
• Gets a lot of publisher support – 2287
members
• Many publishers also OpenURL compliant
• Although probably just in its 0.1 version
rather than the NISO standard 1.0
Buy material
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Product identifiers – ISBN, ISSN
Trading product metadata – ONIX
EDI standards
Interested in any standards that
support e-commerce and
microtransactions
Know what can be done
with material
• RELs (Rights Expression Languages):
XrML; ODRL
• Don’t think many publishers using
• ONIX for Licensing Terms – a standard
syntax for expressing T&Cs (not for
standardising the T&Cs themselves)
• Shibboleth – Attribute Release Policy
• Automated Content Access Protocol
Be kept up to date about material
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RSS
But beware which version
1.0 is RDF Site Summary
2.0 is Really Simple Syndication
2.0 is not a development of 1.0
Completely different standards
2.0 is simpler than 1.0 but less flexible
“Urchin” open-source RSS aggregator
developed by NPG (PALS project)
Manage library records
• MARC (but only if mapping to our
m/data sets – publishers aren’t
MARC experts)
• ONIX for Serials (SPS, SOH and SRN)
Use material
• Formats – text PDF, HTML, XML ;
graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG);
multimedia (MPEG)
• E-book formats (Mobipocket)
• DTDs – e.g. NLM becoming the de facto
standard
Assess the value of material
• Usage stats: COUNTER
• SUSHI for aggregated stats
• “Usage Factor” – like the IF
Preserve material
• OAIS; CEDARS
• But publishers don’t really get into
• They preserve their own material but
aren’t experts on ingestion, migration,
emulation, etc.
• Working with the BL on legal deposit
How do publishers assess?
• Will it mean more income (sell more units
or charge more for each unit)?
• Will it reduce costs?
• Will it allow me to make a better product
or service (even if can’t charge more)?
• Will it help to stimulate the market generally?
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Who’s behind the standard?
How likely is take-up?
Should I be a spectator or participant?
Backing horses – what’s the formbook?
Some examples
• Well established and managed – ISBN,
ISSN, CrossRef, ONIX
• Becoming established – ONIX for Serials
• Relatively low take-up, may blossom –
OAI-PMH, OpenURL
• Ones that never really got off the ground –
BICI (stillborn), ISTC (no RA)
• Early days – Shibboleth, ACAP, ORE, OLT
Conclusions
• Some standards are no brainers
• Some need assessing re specific and
general business impact
• Some standards compete
• Some never get anywhere (even if agreed
need)
• They are always a compromise