ACS Digital Library Indexed

I wrote 22 November 2006:

... The first electronic edition of AJIS is now on-line ...

This morning I registered the AJIS with three indexing services. These all communicate via XML formatted data interfaces:

• OAI: The Public Knowledge Project's Open Archives Harvester. This is an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant archive of publications metadata. When indexed it should be possible to search for articles in AJIS from OAI systems around the world. I am not sure how long it will take for the metadata to be indexed.
• Google Scholar Gateway Plugin: This is an extra feature for the OJS system which provides an interface to allow Google to collect information about the journal papers. Google Scholar is a speclai part of Google's search system for academic publising.
• DOIs: CrossRef is a service which provides a lookup (resolver) for the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) of each paper. DOIs are short, easy to reference identifiers for each paper.

For example the DOI for Roger Clarke's paper is:

10.3127/ajis.v14i1.12

That is:

10.3127 ACS (Publisher)
ajis AJIS (Journal)
.v14i1 Volume 14 Number 1
.12 Paper number 12

When entered in the CrossRef resolver this DOI produces the URL of the paper: <http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/12>.

For the DOIs OJS generates an XML file listing all the papers. Unlike the OAI and Google Scholar interfaces which are "live" and once set up just work; for each issue of each journal a batch file of DOI metadata has to be manually loaded to the CrossRef system. While this is not difficult, hopefully OJS will provide an automated interface in the future.

Here is what the entry for Roger Clarke's paper looks like:

<journal_article publication_type="full_text">
<titles>
<title>Key Aspects of the History of the Information Systems Discipline in Australia</title>
</titles>
<contributors>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="first">
<given_name>Roger</given_name>
<surname>Clarke</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>
<publication_date media_type="online">
<month>12</month>
<day>04</day>
<year>2006</year>
</publication_date>
<publisher_item><item_number>12</item_number></publisher_item>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.3127/ajis.v14i1.12</doi>
<resource><a href="http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/12" eudora="autourl">http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/12</a></resource>
</doi_data>
</journal_article>

If that all sounds complicated, it is. But apart from uploading one DOI file each time there is a new edition of the journal, everything should be automatic.

ps: For the philosophy behind all this, see my ANU talk.