A publishers 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) doesnt seem to have had much take-up OAI-PMH – based on DC

Publishers tend not to be involved with: Z39.50 METS MODS Metasearch

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 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 Dont 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 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 arent 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 dont really get into They preserve their own material but arent 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 cant charge more)? Will it help to stimulate the market generally?

Whos behind the standard? How likely is take-up? Should I be a spectator or participant? Backing horses – whats 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