I have documentation from working with them on the publisher side. I will follow up with you by email.

David

Thanks for the pointer, great post at your blog (which I’ve added to my blogroll)! You might find the Physics arXiv’s API interesting (link). There is also a mailing list, linked from that page.

On the issue of machine-readability standards, there is already a standard for metadata (OAI) that is quite useful (link), and which is supported by many journals. I do think it can be improved a lot, and there is progress in this direction (OAI is on version 2, already). Similar standards don’t yet seem to exist for entire articles, so there is an interesting opportunity there.

Though it seems like a great way to move things forward eventually, I don’t think pushing for government mandates is really going to work any time soon. This is because a) the technology for doing this effectively really is challenging to use b) most people have a hard time understanding what “machine-readable” means, c) all of the publishers will fight it (unless the standard comes from one of them – and then they will fight with each other).

Before it can reach the level of broad standards, some one really need to step up and build a working example and demonstrate it. Ideally, an organization that is already pretty well respected like PLOS (http://www.plos.org/) could be convinced to host a machine-useful version of their journal. Failing that, a system could be built on top of a collection of existing journal articles. If the system could be demonstrated to do new and useful things (e.g. answer cross-paper queries) then perhaps the argument could then be carried to government forces. Otherwise, perhaps the argument could be carried directly to scientists and a completely new journal created. (I kind of like the latter idea and would be keen to be a part of it).

On the infrastructure issue, it’s worth pointing out that the total infrastructure costs (computing + bandwith) associated to the academic literature are quite modest. Depending on exactly what one counts, on the order of 1-10 million papers are published per year. This is storable on a (powerful) single machine, and easily on a rather small cluster of machines. Bandwidth is more of an issue, but is still relatively modest.

Andrew Odlyzko has several excellent papers (see, e.g., this one) where he analyses the cost of online publication. The upshot is that even ten years ago (when the papers were written) the infrastructure costs were relatively small.

One more comment: you say that semantic markup is hard. I won’t argue the point, but I don’t think one needs to solve the problems you’re presumably thinking about to publish useful machine-readable data. A mandate to publish (for example) high-quality Open Archive Initiative (OAI) data is quite feasible right now, and would have great benefits.

Thankyou for the links! I’ll be adding several of those to my blogroll.

On the mandate issue, I’m personally not entirely sure a mandate is the right idea. I’m not against it, I just haven’t thought the issue through to my satisfaction.

With that said, if Open Access is to be mandated, then I think it’s worth doing right, and that means, in my opinion, that provisions should be made for Machine-Readable Open Access. Such a mandate will prevent the problems I described in this post from arising.