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Last week Pablo Fernicola sent me email announcing that Microsoft have finally released a beta of their Word plugin for marking-up manuscripts with the NLM DTD. I say “finally” because we’ve know this was on the way and have been pretty excited to see it. We once even hoped that MS might be able to show the plug-in at the ALPSP session on the NLM DTD, but we couldn’t quite manage it.

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape.

I love the comment an authority:

“Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.”

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick.

Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organisations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works. While researchers might prefer electronic versions of the publications for their day-to-day work, print versions of the same publications seemed to continue to play a critical role as an “awareness tool.” I know that, for this very reason, several NGO/IGOs that I’ve spoken to have despaired of ever ramping down their print operations.

Last week we had a second face-to-face of the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange) Technical Committee in New York, the meeting being hosted courtesy of Google. (Hence the snap here taken from the terrace of Google’s canteen with its gorgeous view of midtown Manhattan. And the food’s not too shabby either. ;~)

The main input to the meeting was this discussion document: Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective. This document we feel has now reached a level of maturity that we wanted to share with a wider audience. We invite feedback either directly at ore@openarchives.org or indirectly via yours truly.

We updated our Project Prospect articles today to release v1.1, with a pile of look & feel improvements to the HTML views and links. The most interesting technical addition is the launch of our enhanced RSS feeds, where we have updated our existing feeds for enhanced articles. These now include ontology terms and primary compounds both visually (as text terms and 2D images) and within the RDF - using the OBO in OWL representation and the info:inchi specification mentioned here by Tony only a few weeks ago.

The enhanced entries will soon become more common as we concentrate our enhancements on our Advance Articles, but the current example below from our Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences feed is lovely. RDF code after the jump - just as beautiful to the parents…

Just a quick note to mention that we’ve now set up a new mailing list otmi-discuss@crossref.org for public discussion of OTMI - the Open Text Mining Interface proposed by Nature. See the list information page here for details on subscribing to the list and to access the mail archives.

And many thanks to the Crossref folks for hosting this for us!

In light of my earlier post on OTMI, the mail copied below from Sebastian Hammer at Index Data about open content may be of interest. They are looking to compile a listing of web sources of open content - see this page for further details.

(Via XML4lib and other lists.)