Online Publishing Standards
Oxford Journals is investing in an ongoing programme of developments which will provide support for open standards throughout our online publishing processes, and products.
Our standards compliance strategy is informed by recommendations from organizations including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as industry-specific standards recommendations such as
- the JISC Information Environment technical architecture
- the NHS Enterprise Architecture
- relevant parts of the NISO Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections
CURRENTLY SUPPORTED STANDARDS
Athens authentication - all of our journals support access via Athens authentication, as do a number of other online products from OUP such as the Oxford English Dictionary online. A list of Athens-protected resources from all publishers is available from Eduserv.
Our Athens compliance also allows access for Shibboleth-enabled institutions via the Athens/Shibboleth gateway. A good description of the gateway has been posted on the JISC Access Management blog.
COUNTER - our usage statistics are COUNTER 2-compliant (www.projectcounter.org). See our Usage Statistics for Institutional Administrators page for more details.
Creative Commons - articles published under an Open Access model are licensed using Creative Commons. As well as the licence in print, a machine-readable licence is embedded in the HTML source using RDF, Dublin Core, and PRISM metadata.
DOI and CrossRef - archive, current, and online ahead of print content are assigned DOIs and metadata is submitted to CrossRef for all Oxford Journals titles. Librarians should note that the CrossRef database is freely accessible to libraries for DOI lookup and linking. As an organization, Oxford Journals is represented on the CrossRef technical working group.
Dublin Core metadata - See dublincore.org. Our OAI-PMH and RSS data feeds expose article metadata using the Dublin Core metadata element set.
MARC - MAchine Readable Cataloging records at the publication level are available for download (see here)
NLM XML - since 2006, the source data-encoding format for our online journals is the National Library of Medicine's Journal Publishing DTD. During 2007-8 all data for our ~1m journal articles will be normalized to this DTD.
OAI-PMH - The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. See www.openarchives.org for general information, or our OAI-PMH help page for information on OAI-PMH support in Oxford Journals.
OpenURL inbound linking - also known as 'OpenURL as a target'. Inbound OpenURLs can be resolved to article content either via CrossRef (see here) or directly from popular link resolvers to HighWire, Oxford Journals' online host.
OpenURL outbound linking - institutions with OpenURL-compliant link resolvers can add reference links to Oxford Journals content so that their institution's users are directed to specific resources. Further information on this feature can be found here. Outbound OpenURL links are Z39.88-2004/OpenURL 1.0-compliant.
PRISM metadata - The Dublin Core metadata element set provides a relatively limited set of metadata elements. Using PRISM, we have further enriched our RSS web feeds with publishing-specific metadata such as <prism:startingPage>4573</prism:startingPage>. See the source of any of our RSS XML feeds for examples of embedded PRISM metadata, and www.prismstandard.org for more information on the standard.
RSS - also known as Web feeds, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. Used for alerting, or machine-to-machine harvesting of metadata. See our RSS help page for more information.
SRU federated searching - allows our search engine to be queried by federated search software, with queries and results encoded in a standard XML schema. The Oxford Journals SRU service is described in detail on the search technical information page.
Unicode - the www.oxfordjournals.org website uses a Unicode-aware content-management system which makes possible publication of our China and Japan portal sites (if your browser isn't Unicode-aware see here). In 2008, all journal content pages will be rebuilt using Unicode-aware technology.
WAI, Section 508, and ADA accessibility - the latest version of www.oxfordjournals.org was designed with accessibility-compliance in mind. See the separate Accessibility Statement for further information.
STANDARDS-COMPLIANCE IN DEVELOPMENT
ABCe website traffic certification - we are currently re-building our usage statistics processing system which will deliver ABCe-audited usage statistics in addition to COUNTER-compliant stats. [Expected delivery date: Q4 2007]
Shibboleth - institutions using Shibboleth authentication can access Oxford Journals content using the OpenAthens Shibboleth gateway. See the Athens entry on this page for an explanation of this gateway. News of direct support for SAML/Shibboleth on oxfordjournals.org will be available in 2008.
SUSHI - Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (see the NISO SUSHI website). SUSHI-compliance will be include in the next update of COUNTER-compliance, expected 2008.
STANDARDS COMPLIANCE REQUESTS
If you think we should be supporting specific standards in addition to those listed here, let us know.