Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 10:10:48 +0530
From: Madhuresh
Dear All,
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced a new set of
standards for publishing online journal articles. The Journal Archiving
and Interchange Document Type Definition (JAIDTD) is freely available for
public use and creates a standard that, if broadly adopted, could signal
a significant sea change in the future of scholarly journals. The new DTD
and the Tagset are in XML and they are in the public domain. Complete
information and documentation can be found at http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov.
The detail can be found at
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb030623-1.shtml. I am also attaching
the whole news item.
NLM Proposes New Journal Standards
by Robin Peek
June 23, 2003 — The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has
announced a new set of standards for publishing online journal
articles.
The Journal Archiving and Interchange Document Type Definition
(JAIDTD)
is freely available for public use and creates a standard that, if
broadly adopted, could signal a significant sea change in the future
of
scholarly journals.
Since the mid-1990s, scholarly journals have been striving to make
their
content available on the Web for greater distribution, ease of
searching
and retrieval, or just to have a Web presence. “These
electronic
files are created to meet the needs of the Internet—usually
without much thought given to long-term archiving of the
content,”
says Dr. David Lipman, director of the Library's National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI). “Today we release two
Document
Type Definitions (DTDs) that will simplify journal publishing and
increase the accuracy of the archiving and exchange of scholarly
journal
articles.”
To put this in context, the JAIDTD could be to journals what HTML was
to
the Web. The Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD Suite provides a
set
of XML modules that define elements and attributes for describing the
textual and graphical content of journal articles, as well as some
non-article material, such as letters, editorials, and book and
product
reviews.
“We didn't start out to create a standardized archiving format
for
articles,” says NCBI’s Jeff Beck. “We were starting
a
major revision to our DTD at the same time that a
company—Inera,
Inc., of Newton, Mass.—was working on the 'E-Journal Archival
DTD
Feasibility Study' for the Harvard University E-Journal Archiving
Project. That study concluded that a common format for archiving was
possible, but that it hadn't been defined yet. We shared our revised
DTD
with Inera, and it seemed like we almost had it.”
The new DTD and the Tagset are in XML and they are in the public domain.
Complete information and documentation can be found at
http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov.
Of course no one knows how readily the publishing community will
accept
the JAIDTD. The NLM will naturally be encouraging journals that
submit
to PubMed Central (http://www.pubmed.org) to use the JAIDTD. But
while
the JAIDTD has been created for PubMed Central, and NCBI will manage
the
updates, adherence to the JAIDTD is not mandatory, as journals may
have
already established their own XML models.
In the proverbial best case scenario, the journals not yet committed
to
an XML standard will embrace JAIDTD and its promise of a brand new
(and
better day) of publishing, transferring, and archiving journals.
Sister
disciplines will see the advantages of JAIDTD for their journals and
proceed to adopt it themselves. This, in turn, will cause a snowball
effect, and journals throughout the lands and the disciplines will
take
up the standard. For this to happen, there must be a considerable
effort
to promote JAIDTD so that journals do not become too deeply entrenched
in their own ways of doing things.
To date, no other organization has offered up an XML standard for
journals and one hopes that there are not a multitude of such
standards
under development. In theory, at least, such a standard for journals
would not really have a vast range of differences from journal to
journal. But commercial publishers have a long history of creating
their
own ways of doing things with the notion of “sharing”
perhaps not first and foremost on their agendas.
But, of course, there is the possibility of a less positive outcome.
Like PubMed Central, JAIDTD could be a really good idea that
doesn’t get much traction. While not exactly fallow, with just
over 100 journals in PubMed Central, this represents only a small
fraction of the thousands of journal titles in the biomedical
sciences.
Hopefully other standard setting organizations will take a good long
look at this new proposed standard and will elect to partner with NLM
to
make it a standard that matters.
Robin Peek is associate professor at the Graduate School of Library and
Information Science at Simmons College. Her e-mail address is
robin.peek@simmons.edu.
Regards.
Madhuresh Singhal
Aurigene Discovery Technologies Limited,
Electronic City, phase II, Hosur Road,
Bangalore 562 158 India
Phone 8521314-16 Ext.- 422
Mobile 98861 82822
