Guest Post: The Time for Open and Interoperable Annotation is Now

Annotation is increasingly being recognized as a valuable tool in scholarly communications, enabling increased engagement and collaboration and better metrics, and helping improve the quality of scholarly outputs. In this guest post, Heather Staines (Director of Business Development – Hypothes.is) and Alexander Naydenov (Head of Marketing and Co-Founder – Paperhive) tell us why!

PIDapalooza – Revenge of the Nerds

PIDapalooza, the first ever festival of persistent identifiers, set out not only to bring together the creators and users of PIDs, but also to make PIDs cool. Did it succeed? Find out in this report on the event from Alice Meadows and Phill Jones

Is the Proposed Merger of IDPF and W3C Good for Publishers?

The IDPF and the W3C recently announced they were making plans to merge. Will this merger be good for publishers by integrating them more closely into the community that manages the web infrastructure? Or will the merger result in diminishing publisher control over one of the important distribution standards for digital texts? The past five years of experience doesn’t give reason to be reassured of the outcome.

Integrate to Innovate: Using Standards to Push Content Forward

While many of the traditional publishing tasks remain intact, new tasks that are much more technical in nature have changed the skill sets required to be scholarly publishers. As new and developing standards and services such as Funder Identification, ORCID, CHORUS, and more come online, publishers and their vendors must integrate when they would rather innovate. The trick is in realizing where integration allows more innovation.

Why Are Publishers and Editors Wasting Time Formatting Citations?

The majority of time spent in editing and formatting citations in the publication process is time wasted. We now have in place nearly all the components to use persistent identifiers, linked metadata, and style sheets to improve how citations can be structured and processed. Using these tools can significantly improve the accuracy of references and reduce the time editors spend on this production function. Even when automated, we bounce between linked metadata, then to text, then to metadata again.