PRESS RELEASE FROM NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
30 June 2009

Contact: Grace Baynes
Corporate Public Relations, Nature Publishing Group
T:+44 (0)20 7014 4063
g.baynes@nature.com

In partnership with Nature Publishing Group, specialist publishing services provider The Charlesworth Group has completed a substantial project to incorporate eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata within online PDFs for the leading science journal Nature.

This development improves the archiving of new Nature content and allows easier, more accurate searching for research articles, providing a better service for users of the nature.com web site. XMP-embedded PDFs are available on nature.com for the December 18, 2008 issue of Nature onwards. XMP metadata is now embedded in all new Nature research articles as they are published. It will not be retrospectively applied to the existing Nature archive.

In a collaborative project with Nature Publishing Group, Charlesworth's development team created a tailored workflow solution to handle the work. The resulting bespoke system of automated batch-processing extracts information from XML files, and produces standardized validated PDF files with the XMP metadata embedded.

Technically, XMP supports the embedding of metadata within PDF files, providing a standards-based structure for meaningful information. Article titles, author details, searchable keywords, copyright information and subject matter can all be embedded within the PDF in a format which is not only human-readable but can also be understood by software applications. Since the standard is extensible, users can also add their own custom metadata.

The introduction of this technology will 'futureproof' Nature Publishing Group's PDFs for use in new web applications being developed for the semantic web.

Tony Hammond, Applications Architect for nature.com said of the development, "With XMP all manner of scholarly content - documents, images and other media types - can be properly labelled and applications can directly profit from the rich descriptions bundled with the media.

We now have a complete bibliographic record (including DOI) embedded in our PDFs using XMP structured markup. And, moreover, we also have a solid foundation for adding in additional metadata elements as our needs develop."

Howard Ratner, Chief Technology Officer, Nature Publishing Group added, "We have worked very closely with the development team at Charlesworth and are delighted with the outcome. Enriching our content with metadata at the typesetting stage is a natural fit."

Following completion of the project Charlesworth has seen a great level of interest in the potential of XMP from a number of large publishers hoping to take advantage of the benefits it offers.

-ENDS-

For further information contact:

North America:

Adrian Stanley, CEO
Tel: +1 215 922 1611
Email: usa@charlesworth.com

UK & Europe:

Sarah Philp, Marketing Manager
Telephone: +44 (0)1924 204830
Email: s_philp@charlesworth.com

About The Charlesworth Group:

The Charlesworth Group employs around 100 staff in its UK printing and binding operation plus over 200 staff in its wholly owned subsidiary with offices in Beijing and Langfang, China. The Group also has a sales office based in Philadelphia, USA, working closely with our numerous North American clients.

The Charlesworth Group are leading the way in Rights and Licensing agreements and marketing in China, as well as having cutting edge composition technology and pre-press services. The Charlesworth Group have been working closely with NSTL for the last 7 years, introducing publishers and online content for National Online agreements in Mainland China.

The China offices provide typesetting, production and print management services together with continuously developing Rights related work such as the sale of publications to Chinese libraries, Government and Pharmaceutical companies.

The Charlesworth Group produce litho and digitally printed, perfect and case bound work from one manufacturing site in purpose built facilities in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

Clients include world leading publishers, Societies, University Presses, Government departments, not-for-profit and commercial organisations.

For further details on the Group visit our web site at www.charlesworth.com

About Nature Publishing Group (NPG)

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine.

Focusing on the needs of scientists, Nature (founded in 1869) is the leading weekly, international scientific journal. In addition, for this audience, NPG publishes a range of Nature research journals and Nature Reviews journals, plus a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. Online, nature.com provides over 5 million visitors per month with access to NPG publications and online databases and services, including Nature News and Nature Jobs plus access to Nature Network and Nature Education's Scitable.com.

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