Digital Publishing: Principles, Practices, and Promises

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Digital Publishing Principles, Practices, and
Promises

• Alexa T. McCray
• National Library of Medicine
• Bethesda, Maryland USA
• mccray_at_nlm.nih.gov

Change and Continuity in Scientific Communication
Amsterdam, June 25, 2001
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Outline

• Principles for digital publishing
• Practices that arise from these principles
• Case studies
• Promises that we make to our present and future
  users

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Principles

• Expect change
• Know your content
• Involve the right people
• Design usable systems
• Ensure open access

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Principles

• Beaware of data rights
• Automate whenever possible
• Adopt and adhere to standards
• Ensure quality
• Be concerned about persistence

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Case Studies

• PubMed Central
• http//www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
• ClinicalTrials.gov
• http//clinicaltrials.gov/
• Profiles in Science
• http//profiles.nlm.nih.gov/

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PubMed Central

• Archive of Life Science journals
• Journal content submitted in SGML or XML format
  with high resolution images
• Full text viewing options
• Free in PubMed Central (with possible delayed
  release)
• Only at publishers site and free within a year
  of publication

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Production Journals

• Arthritis Research
• BioMed Central about 20 titles
• bmj.com
• Breast Cancer Research
• Critical Care
• Genome Biology
• Molecular Biology of the Cell
• PNAS

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Upcoming Journals

• Nucleic Acids Research, and EMBO Journal (Oxford
  University Press)
• Journal of Medical Entomology (Entomological
  Society of America)
• Canadian Medical Association Journal
• Bulletin of the Medical Library Association
• Journal of the American Medical Informatics
  Association

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Upcoming Journals

• Biochemical Journal (Biochemical Society -
  Portland Press)
• Plant Physiology, and Plant Cell (American
  Society of Plant Physiologists)
• Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Wound
  Repair and Regeneration (Blackwell)
• GENETICS (Genetics Society of America)

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Design Principles

• Explicit tagging of content
• Portable
• Facilitates intelligent manipulation
• Freely accessible to all
• Methods to ensure data management, archiving and
  persistence

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ClinicalTrials.gov

• Database of information on experimental research
  studies
• Currently 5400 trials, 60,000 locations
• System designed primarily for patients and other
  members of the public
• Links to further just-in-time information
• MEDLINEplus PubMed clinical trial resources

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ClinicalTrials.gov

• Centralized system at NLM
• Content provided by individual data providers
• Standard set of data elements in XML format
• Basic descriptive information
• Summary recruitment information eligibility
  criteria study design intervention being
  studied
• Location and contact information
• Supplementary information

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Design Principles

• Easily and freely accessible to the public
• Preserve the privacy of users
• Tools for entering, validating, and maintaining
  constantly updated data
• Permanent unique identifiers
• Tagging standard for data sharing, integrity,
  management and transmission

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Profiles in Science

• Digital conversion project
• Archival collections of eminent biomedical
  scientists of the twentieth century
• Books, journal volumes, pamphlets, diaries,
  letters, manuscripts, photographs
• Materials in a variety of formats
• Text, audio, still images, video

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Metadata-drivenDocument Conversion

• Interpret metadata in broadest sense
• Use metadata to drive the entire system
• Metadata record is the basic unit in the system,
  managing the
• Digitization process
• Display and organization of the data
• Network-based resource discovery

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Design Principles

• Develop automated tools to assist in the
  significant intellectual efforts involved
• Create underlying data once
• Capture high-resolution images generate
  derivatives for the Web
• Metadata standard elements
• Generate multiple versions and multiple views
  from the same underlying data

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Preservation of Digital Information

• The conclusion reached by the impressive group
  of 21 experts was alarming there is, at present
  no way to guarantee the preservation of digital
  information. (Rothenberg, 1999)
• Technological obsolescence is the greatest
  threat to digital collections. (Kenney Rieger,
  2000)

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Persistence of Digital Information

• Digital libraries select, structure, offer
  intellectual access to, interpret, distribute,
  preserve the integrity of, and ensure the
  persistence over time of collections of digital
  works (Digital Library Federation, 1998)

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Persistence of NLMs Digital Resources

• Report of NLM Working Group (Oct 2000)
• http//www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/reports/permanence.pdf
  
• Four levels of permanence
• Permanent unchanging content, e.g. Profiles in
  Science scanned document
• Permanent stable content, e.g., MEDLINE record

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Levels of Permanence

• Permanent dynamic content, e.g., NLM home page
• Permanence not guaranteed, e.g., fact sheets
• Two additional categories for aggregate resources
• Growing (items may still be added over time)
• Closed (items no longer added to resource that
  previously subject to growth)

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Concluding Remarks

• Digital publishing requires technical decisions
• Adhere to standards, plan for change
• Digital publishing involves social issues
• Sharing of data and knowledge
• Open access to information
• Digital publishing implies promises to our users
• Integrity, currency, and persistence of data