The authors, who work for Nature Publishing Group, have been working on RSS content aggregation for a while now. The same group released Urchine, an RSS aggregator, on SourceForge recently. This article accompanies the soft launch of Connotea, "a social bookmarking tool like a kind of scientific 'del.icio.us' or 'CiteULike'," according to their email. The authors put the case bluntly in their second paragraph. "The bastion of online publishing is under threat as never before. RSS is the very antithesis of the website." But instead of fighting online distribution (like publishers in some other industries) these authors are embracing it - and the community, for example through the release of the PRISM RSS module on RSS-DEV. "Our view is that providing RSS is a natural means of expanding web-based interfaces into NPG content. In essence, RSS allows us to dramatically increase the surface area of our website and to project that presence across the Web. Moreover, by disseminating DOI identifiers [n13] via RSS we have a much-expanded set of stable and persistent access points into our content. A second reason is the downstream potential for generating advertising revenue." I have expressed my views on the downside of commercialized RSS in the past. Let me now identify the upside - if it can increase naccess to resources currently hidden behind publishers' subscription walls, then everybody gains (even the publishers).
Today: 1 Total: 1088 [Direct link] [Share]
