The new OAI-PMH interface to Nature.com sports one particular novelty which may well be of interest here: it makes use of the PRISM Aggregator Message.

Over the past two weeks we’ve focused on our OpenURL query interface with the goal being to improve its reliability. I’d like to mention some things we’ve done.

OCLC has published a report (PDF) identifying some requirements for what they call a “Cooperative Identities Hub”. A quick glance through it seems to show that the use cases focus on what we are calling the “Knowledge Discovery” use cases.

Martin Fenner continues his interest in the subject of author identifiers. He recently posted an online poll asking people some specific questions about how they would like to see an author identifier implemented.* The results of the poll are in and, though the sample was very small, the results are interesting.

So while doing some background reading today I realized that legal citations already widely support a form of “citation typing” in the form of “Introductory Signals“. The 10 introductory signals break down as follows… In support of an argument: 1) [no signal]. (NB that, apparently, this is increasingly deprecated.) 2) accord; 3) see;

I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.* Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept

Discussions around “contributor Ids” (aka “Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular.

Over the past few months there seems to have been a sharp upturn in general interest around implementing an “author identifier” system for the scholarly community. This, in turn, has meant that more people have been getting in touch with us about our nascent “Contributor ID” project.

Alf Eaton just posted a real nice analysis of ticTOCs RSS feeds. Good to see that almost half of the feeds (46%) are now in RDF and that fully a third (34%) are using PRISM metadata to disclose bibliographic fields.

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing Crossref DOIs integrated in an iPhone app.

The W3C has recently (Jan. 16) released CURIE Syntax 1.0 as a Candidate Recommendation and is inviting implementations. (Note that I made a fuller post here on CURIEs and erroneously confused the Editor’s Draft (Oct. 23, ’08) as being a Candidate Recommendation.