ANALYSIS AND NEWS
The same thing is happening on an institutional level. Companies such as Ringgold and GRID are standardising and normalising institutional names so that they can be added to article metadata and provide reliable, searchable information about author affiliations. Unfortunately, the industry is not yet at the point of collaborating on standards in this area, but this is certainly needed. Again, affiliations are an important part of the context of an article that can be a signal for readers of a certain quality niveau.
I could further mention portals such as DataCite and Figshare that give DOIs for data or publishers such as EMBO, F1000 Research and others that include peer review reports as part of the article. Behind all of these efforts is the assumption that the article must both function autonomously and interconnect via persistent identifiers with the whole body of scientific literature. It requires a high level of cooperation and meticulous attention to detail from publishers that that should be commended.
It is worth looking back to the first publisher collaboration of this kind – CrossRef. Started in 2000 with 12 founding members, it now includes essentially every serious academic publisher world wide. CrossRef registers a DOI
for each article. Publishers/typesetters can look up and link DOIs for articles in the literature list to provide the reader of the final product a superior experience, as they can click directly through to a cited article of interest. References are at the beginning and core of the context that each article carries within its XML. They are article-based and publisher independent.
‘Context has become multi- dimensional, publisher- independent and intrinsic’
And thanks to the internet and the publisher collaboration via CrossRef, they are digital, standardised and linked.
So where will context at the article level take us in the future? For one example, at ScienceOpen we are building a platform to expose the multi-dimensional context of an article to support discoverability. We started with references as the first carrier of context. We analysed the references of around a million articles and created an article record for each reference – then merged multiple instances to develop a network of citations. The result is that a researcher can now search in 14 million articles and article
records and sort by citation number, but also easily explore the context around each individual article. The use of DOIs has also made it possible to track article usage in many places on the internet beyond citations, which Altmetric and other companies have built up to a growing standard. On ScienceOpen 14 million articles can be sorted and explored by altmetrics, as well as a variety of other parameters. And context can also be user generated post-publication with commenting, recommendations and peer-review functions. I predict that article-level innovations will continue to unite and disrupt the publishing landscape. The introduction of an increasing number of standardised identifiers and XML metadata requirements makes the work of professional academic publishers ever more complex. But it also makes clear what their value proposition for authors must be – better tagging at the article level means richer context and increased discoverability for authors. CrossRef and other successful collaboration projects have shown that unity around persistent identifiers benefits all players, even as they open the doors to the internet’s disruptive power.
Stephanie Dawson is managing director at Science Open
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