PRESS RELEASE FROM NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
27 October 2009

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

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) now offers remote searching of the nature.com platform via nature.com OpenSearch. The new service allows application software to query nature.com, and returns results in a machine-readable format that can be reused and redisplayed.

Nature.com OpenSearch is the latest example of NPG's drive to improve availability of article metadata on the nature.com platform, maximizing usability for the research and information communities. What's more, "the addition of OpenSearch technology hints at new directions in providing a more general public metadata application programming interface (API) for nature.com," said Tony Hammond, Application Architect at NPG.

As a demonstration of the new OpenSearch service NPG has developed nature.com search desktop widgets. Available for both Mac and PC, the widgets allow users to search nature.com without visiting the website. Searches are put together and sent by the widget, and results can be browsed with links back to the relevant article on nature.com. The widgets are available for download at Apple Downloads and Yahoo! Widgets Gallery. See the screencast on YouTube for an introduction.

Nature.com OpenSearch takes advantage of public protocols, using the emergent Search and Retrieve via URL (SRU) protocol and supporting the industry-standard OpenSearch conventions for accessing search engines. Federated searching, which enables the search of numerous resources via a single search interface, is now fully supported. Queries can be sent as a simple keyword list or as more complex descriptions, and the results returned in a machine-readable list-based format for easy integration.

NPG has recently made a number of improvements to nature.com infrastructure and services. The OpenSearch service follows the introduction earlier this year of support for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), making metadata for all articles published on nature.com available via its OAI-PMH service.

The implementation of MarkLogic Server as the XML repository for nature.com has improved article indexing, making better metadata available for search. Author, title, journal name, DOI and keywords are automatically extracted from articles and indexed in the XML repository.

In December 2008, NPG began marking-up research article PDFs using Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) technology - making article metadata machine-readable. XMP PDFs of research articles are now available in the majority of NPG's journals. In May 2008, NPG started adding metadata to the HTML pages of published articles.

Links and more information:

nature.com OpenSearch
nature.com search widgets
Public interfaces: Nascent blog post (October 2009) nature.com OpenSearch Service
Nascent blog post (May 2009): A Catalog for Nature.com
Press release: Nature Publishing Group uses MarkLogic Server to launch enhanced search platform, (July 2009)
Nascent blog post (December 2008): XMP Labelling for Nature

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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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