Steve Hitchcock

Developing services for open eprint archives: globalisation, integration and the impact of links

The rapid growth of scholarly information resources available in electronic form and their organisation by digital libraries is proving fertile ground for the development of sophisticated new services, of which citation linking will be one indispensable example. Many new projects, partnerships and commercial agreements have been announced to build citation linking applications. This paper describes the Open Citation (OpCit) project, which will focus on linking papers held in freely accessible eprint archives such as the Los Alamos physics archives and other distributed archives, and which will build on the work of the Open Archives initiative to make the data held in such archives available to compliant services. The paper emphasises the work of the project in the context of emerging digital library information environments, explores how a range of new linking tools might be combined and identifies ways in which different linking applications might converge. Some early results of linked pages from the OpCit project are reported.

Citation linking: improving access to online journals

The most innovative online journals are maturing rapidly and distinctive new features are emerging. Foremost among these features is the hypertext link, popularised by the World Wide Web and which will form the basis of a new, highly integrated scholarly literature. Journal integration in this instance seeks to recognise, extend and exploit relationships at the level of journal content-the papers-while maintaining some of the familiar contexts, in some cases journal identities, that define the content hierarchy and inform decision-making by readers. Links are a powerful tool for journal integration, most immediately in the form of citation linking. The paper reviews examples of citation linking in practice, and describes a new system, a link service, which is being developed to support novel and flexible linking mechanisms on the Web. One application of this link service is the Open Journal project, which is working with journal publishers to investigate the most effective ways of applying these powerful link types to enhance online journals.

Web Journals Publishing: A UK Perspective

The Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI) and the Electronic Libraries (eLib) research programme have been catalysts for dramatic change in journals publishing in the UK. Covering over 30 publishers and over 20 other e-journals and e-journal research projects, this report marks the extent of the change and reflects on how e-journals will develop next.

PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services

To date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs.

The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers

Intuitively, if a product is useful and has both a priced and a free version its total usage rate would be expected to be higher than if there is only a priced version. Evidence is emerging that this is true for online research journal papers. Authors need accessible online sites in which to deposit their published papers, and users need a means of discovering and evaluating those papers. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has now produced free software packages for building OAI-compliant institutional archives and OAI search services, including a citation-ranked search and impact discovery service. New data from this service shows that higher usage of free papers leads directly to a higher number of citations and thus greater research impact. Institutional archives need far more papers to be deposited, and one way of bringing this about is to implement institutional and national policies mandating the self-archiving of all funded research output in open access archives. This paper outlines why such policies are beneficial to researchers, their institutions, funders, and to research itself.

Where the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet Format Risk Management: P2 Registry

The Web is increasingly becoming a platform for linked data. This means making connections and adding value to data on the Web. As more data becomes openly available and more people are able to use the data, it becomes more powerful. An example is file format registries and the evaluation of format risks. Here the requirement for information is now greater than the effort that any single institution can put into gathering and collating this information. Recognising that more is better, the creators of PRONOM, JHOVE, GDFR and others are joining to lead a new initiative: the Unified Digital Format Registry. Ahead of this effort, a new RDF-based framework for structuring and facilitating file format data from multiple sources, including PRONOM, has demonstrated it is able to produce more links, and thus provide more answers to digital preservation questions - about format risks, applications, viewers and transformations - than the native data alone. This paper will describe this registry, P2, and its services, show how it can be used, and provide examples where it delivers more answers than the contributing resources. The P2 Registry is a reference platform to allow and encourage publication of preservation data, and also an examplar of what can be achieved if more data is published openly online as simple machine-readable documents. This approach calls for the active participation of the digital preservation community to contribute data by simply publishing it openly on the Web as linked data.

A usage based analysis of CoRR

Based on an empirical analysis of author usage of CoRR, and of its predecessor in the Los Alamos eprint archives, it is shown that CoRR has not yet been able to match the early growth of the Los Alamos physics archives. Some of the reasons are implicit in Halpern s paper,and we explore them further here. In particular,we refer to the need to promote CoRR more effectively for its intended community computer scientists in universities, industrial research labs and in government. We take up some points of detail on this new world of open archiving concerning centralversus distributed self-archiving,publication, the restructuring of the journal publishers review and copyright.

Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments

We describe “digitometric” services and tools that add value to open-access eprint archives using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Celestial is an OAI cache and gateway tool. Citebase Search enhances OAI-harvested metadata with linked references harvested from the full-text to provide a web service for citation navigation and research impact analysis. Digitometrics builds on data harvested using OAI to provide advanced visualisation and hypertext navigation for the research community. Together these services provide a modular, distributed architecture for building a “semantic web” for the research literature.