Ross MacIntyre

UKPMC: a full text article resource for the life sciences

UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) is a full-text article database that extends the functionality of the original PubMed Central (PMC) repository. The UKPMC project was launched as the first ‘mirror’ site to PMC, which in analogy to the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, aims to provide international preservation of the open and free-access biomedical literature. UKPMC (http://ukpmc.ac.uk) has undergone considerable development since its inception in 2007 and now includes both a UKPMC and PubMed search, as well as access to other records such as Agricola, Patents and recent biomedical theses. UKPMC also differs from PubMed/PMC in that the full text and abstract information can be searched in an integrated manner from one input box. Furthermore, UKPMC contains ‘Cited By’ information as an alternative way to navigate the literature and has incorporated text-mining approaches to semantically enrich content and integrate it with related database resources. Finally, UKPMC also offers added-value services (UKPMC+) that enable grantees to deposit manuscripts, link papers to grants, publish online portfolios and view citation information on their papers. Here we describe UKPMC and clarify the relationship between PMC and UKPMC, providing historical context and future directions, 10 years on from when PMC was first launched.

Europe PMC: a full-text literature database for the life sciences and platform for innovation

This article describes recent developments of Europe PMC (http://europepmc.org), the leading database for life science literature. Formerly known as UKPMC, the service was rebranded in November 2012 as Europe PMC to reflect the scope of the funding agencies that support it. Several new developments have enriched Europe PMC considerably since then. Europe PMC now offers RESTful web services to access both articles and grants, powerful search tools such as citation-count sort order and data citation features, a service to add publications to your ORCID, a variety of export formats, and an External Links service that enables any related resource to be linked from Europe PMC content.

Prototyping Digital Library Technologies in zetoc

zetoc is a current awareness and document delivery service providing World Wide Web and Z39.50 access to the British Librarys Electronic Table of Contents database of journal articles and conference papers, along with an email alerting service. An experimental prototype version of zetoc is under development, based on open standards, including Dublin Core and XML, and using the open source, leading-edge Cheshire II information retrieval technology. Enhancements investigated in this prototype include request and delivery of discovered articles, location of electronic articles using OpenURL technology, and additional current awareness functionality including the exposure of journal issue metadata according to the Open Archives Initiative protocol. These experimental developments will enhance the zetoc service to improve the information environment for researchers and learners.

Dublin Core Metadata for Electronic Journals

This paper describes the design of an electronic journals application where the article header information is held as Dublin Core metadata. Current best practice in the use of Dublin Core for bibliographic data description is indicated where this differs from pragmatic decisions made when the application was designed. Using this working application as a case study to explore the specification of a metadata schema to describe bibliographic data indicates that the use of Dublin Core metadata is viable within the journals publishing sector, albeit with the addition of some local, domain-specific extensions.

Towards an Integrated Digital Library; Exploration of User Responses to a `Joined-Up' Service

Digital library users have to deal with many separate services. This paper describes efforts in the United Kingdom to use OpenURL technology to provide ‘joined-up’ services. The focus is on zetoc, a national electronic service, which enables users to find references in a British Library bibliographic database. zetoc now uses OpenURL technology to provide routes to services, which might give users access to electronic full text versions of references they have found. Data is provided from two questionnaire surveys and an interview programme conducted to explore user responses to these services. These evaluation studies show that users want these integrated services and are extremely positive about them when they work. However, ‘joined-up’ services depend for their success on the access rights that each user has to full text sources in their institution. As a result, the success level in obtaining full text varies considerably between institutions. Users in disadvantageous positions have expressed disappointment and frustration; the service may be regarded as a promise not fulfilled. The paper describes the development of ‘joined-up services’ as a partnership at national and local levels.

IRUS-UK: Improving Understanding of the Value and Impact of Institutional Repositories

Institutional repositories (IRs) are important research management tools that can give increased visibility to the institution’s scholarly outputs. Although statistics were previously available through the various repository interfaces, without an agreed standard it was not possible to measure usage across a range of IRs accurately. IRUS-UK is a national aggregation service, containing details of all content downloaded from participating IRs in the United Kingdom. Through collecting raw usage data and processing them into item-level usage statistics IRUS-UK provides comparable and authoritative standards-based data and also acts as an intermediary between UK repositories and other agencies.

Electronic journal usage data within NESLI

The presentation concerns the production of usage data within NESLI. This involves MIMAS working with an aggregator, SwetsBlackwell, to produce usage reports requested by the initiatives Steering Committee.

Facts and Myths of Browsing and Searching in a Digital Library

In recent times, there has been increased interest in the querying of digital libraries (DLs). This is due in part to the development of the WWW, which enables easy access to both centralised and distributed digital library sources. The majority of published works on querying DLs are associated with information retrieval (IR), also known as digital querying. Information retrieval techniques are popular with querying DLs due to their flexibility in querying semi-structured data. In contrast, database querying of DLs has been largely ignored until only recent years. The key aspects of database querying of DLs involve the integration of database querying with browsing or navigating techniques to query semi-structured data. Our interest lies in developing the relatively limited database query facilities currently available to users of DLs, and a key stage in this process is to define what kinds of searching and browsing typical users would like to perform.

The technologies that oil the supply chain

For the Key Issue this time Serials asked Ross MacIntyre to present an overview of some of the standards that underpin the information industry. What he delivers is an all-you-can-eat banquet, to whet your appetite for the intricacies of these key technologies.

NESLI MARC records: an experiment in creating MARC records for e-journals.

Summary This article concerns an experiment in producing US-MARC records for e-journals within the UKs National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI). This involved working with an aggregator, Swets Blackwell, to produce sample records that were made available for comment. Some other related developments are also mentioned.