[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

OpenURL COinS

I've been working with a group of people to crystallize a spec for putting OpenURL metadata into HTML. The Spec has been named OpenURL COinS (for ContextObject in Span) and it's now available at http://ocoins.info/

Here's a short summary of why we're excited about this.

You can now use OpenURL COinS to make references to books and
journal-articles in libraries from

1. static websites
2. blogs
3. Wikipedia and other Wikis
4. open-access journals
5. pay-per-view web sites
6. other non-subscription databases, public resources, etc.

From the point of view of an open-access journal producer (we produce an

OA Journal for the Materials Research Society) this has been really great.
I just regenerated the web pages in the reference section of this journal
to include OpenURL COinS, and with no further work, no collecting user
information or link resolver addresses, no membership fees to pay etc,
I've OpenURL-enabled 4000 references in the journal.

The only catch is that to see clickable links, users must download a
browser plugin or have an institution supplied COinS processor, and at the
moment, the only browser plugin available
(http://www.openly.com/openurlref/ ) supports FireFox only. As this plugin
is open-source, we expect to see the functionality propagated to many
systems. It's always a chicken and egg sort of thing.

Eric
--

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
eric@openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything