Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced that it now offers remote searching of the nature.com platform via nature.com OpenSearch. The new service allows application software to query nature.com, and returns results in a machine-readable format that can be reused and redisplayed.
OpenSearch is projected as the latest example of NPG's drive to improve availability of article metadata on the nature.com platform, maximising usability for the research and information communities. As a demonstration of the new OpenSearch service NPG has developed nature.com search desktop widgets. Available for both Mac and PC, the widgets allow users to search nature.com without visiting the website. Searches are put together and sent by the widget, and results can be browsed with links back to the relevant article on nature.com. The widgets are available for download at Apple Downloads and Yahoo! Widgets Gallery.
Nature.com OpenSearch is claimed to take advantage of public protocols, using the emergent Search and Retrieve via URL (SRU) protocol and supporting the industry-standard OpenSearch conventions for accessing search engines. Federated searching, which enables the search of numerous resources via a single search interface, is now fully supported. Queries can be sent as a simple keyword list or as more complex descriptions, and the results returned in a machine-readable list-based format for easy integration.
NPG has recently made a number of improvements to nature.com infrastructure and services. The OpenSearch service follows the introduction earlier this year of support for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), making metadata for all articles published on nature.com available via its OAI-PMH service.
The implementation of MarkLogic Server as the XML repository for nature.com is seen to have improved article indexing, making better metadata available for search. Author, title, journal name, DOI and keywords are automatically extracted from articles and indexed in the XML repository.
In December 2008, NPG began marking-up research article PDFs using Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) technology - making article metadata machine-readable. XMP PDFs of research articles are now available in the majority of NPG's journals.
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