Some publishers hesitate a bit, but others go full speed ahead into the electronic publishing era. Noel commented on my post about OA/OD inviting added value:

I heard a talk by the RSC at the ACS, saying that their RSS feeds contain InChIs now! Just thought I’d throw that out there :-)

The RSC Project Prospect is ahead of other publishers, for over a year already. Adding InChIs to RSS feeds are a cheap way of adding machine-readable chemistry to ones publishing pipeline; adding CML would allow much more detail (see this overview of CMLRSS information in my blog).

But, importantly, it allows third-parties to efficiently set up DOI-InChI tables. Cheap (Asian?) workers become rather expensive, when compared to machine mining to create such databases. Sure, the authoring becomes somewhat more expensive, but who will argue that scientists might be a bit more precise in what they publish. I, for sure, would love to see authors focus on adding InChIs to experimental sections, then that they focus on getting EndNote to put the comma, bold and upper casing in the right place, to meet journal standards.

Another publisher who takes its job seriously is Beilstein. Stephan recently showed me some of the things they are up too, like information rich figures (yes, you’ll have access to the source, and identify the molecular structures in reaction schema). He also showed me to the RDF now by default available for all their articles. For example, for DOI:10.1186/1860-5397-3-50, the RDF is available here. It’s indicated in the HTML with:

<link rel='alternate' type='text/rdf' title='RDF' href='http://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/content/rdf/1860-5397-3-50.rdf'/>

There is, actually, also a lot of citation information available in the <meta> tags in the HTML, but apparently not the right stuff yet to have Zotero pick it up nicely (not sure what this Firefox plugin is actually looking for). No chemistry in the RDF it seems, but there is BIBO, FOAF and Dublin Core.

Main suggestion to Stephan, right now, would be to include InChIs in the RDF and RSS feed.

Disclaimer: Colin, behind Project Prospect, visit our group when I was still in Cologne; Stephan contributed code bits to the CDK project, e.g. this this Matrix class.

Oh, Nature is, of course, also a publisher who actively gets into electronic publishing age.

publishing  inchi  cml  rss  foaf