Beyond pdfgarnett2011

beyond the pdf:teaching a new dog old tricks
alexgarnett
public knowledge project
january 2011

the public knowledge project
“OJS,” along with Open Conference Systems and Open Harvester Systems form the “OxS” suite.
soon to come: Open Monograph Press.

what do we want?
save trees – we want users reading on-screen.
save publisher man-hours – we want interoperable software that works.
improvescholarly quality of public works.
convert library budgets – supporting open access through cooperation with publishers.
our userbase is largely comprised of small international teams and libraries-as-publishers.
we make the little guy cutting-edge for free.

our relationship with XML & PDF
lemon8: DOC -> NLM-XML converter
now to be embedded into OxS pub tools
OxS reading tools & plugin framework designed for XML article view
current statistics suggest 90% of article downloads are PDF
can we “design” for a portable document/environment?

ongoing projects: annotation
initial goal: create an annotation / discussion space for public X/HTML articles.
problem: article hosting is no commonality.
reading environments aren’t designed, they’re collocated. (more on this later).

ongoing projects: pagination in xml
theory: we read PDF on the screen because it has a published-ness that X/HTML lacks.
specialized reading environments (e-readers)
can we emulate pagination with CSS?
calculating fixed page length based on typeface
user evaluation forthcoming.

ongoing projects: serving metadata
www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
server-side scripting
to inject metadata into
downloaded PDF
portable navigation
low overhead

ongoing projects: extensible design
if annotation and interlinking take place outside of OxS environment, what is our role?
specifying aesthetics(?)
could use http://itextpdf.com/ as a server-side document converter ala lemon8
ensuring that page header text & figures are printed into different containers so that we can (finally) read plain text directly out of PDF.
(this is essential for annotation too)

reference managers
right now there is a very loose sense in which
zotero = html (COinS, html annotation)
mendeley = PDF (downloading, PDF annotation)
these are complementary, so we don’t need to expressly support one or the other 
…right?

how can we really aid developers?
bibliographic management tools are designed to work with bad data.
e.g. decade-old jstor PDFs.
what is a good document for this use case?
is it x/html, a printed facsimile, or something else?
the bar for publisher PDF standards is low.
inconsistent metadata -> scraping solutions. (etc.)

back to annotations…
the miracle annotation environment:
dynamic article interlinking (lively margins)
repository-driven (we have lots of OA materials…)

fewer clicks = diminishing returns
we can use server-side publishing tools to embed “add to collection” links via DOI/COinS.
but there are already browser plugins for mendeley, zotero, et al.!
interactive reading environments ≠ controlled environments. if social sharing is one step removed from annotation, that’s OK.

designed vs. collocated
quick survey: how do we post to twitter?
deeply idiosyncratic; many entry points.
having controlled input would be nice; this is why news sites use “tweet buttons” to track behaviour.
as it stands, we need to look at the entire twitter dataset post-hoc for sharing metrics. not terrible.
mendeley trying to centralize sharing for scholarly materials. if it works, great; we’ll leave them to it.

solutions on the horizon
OxS plugin architecture
this has been a moving target in the past and we’re trying to slow it down.
OA-specific metadata / annotation crosswalks
now that mendeley is flagging OA materials in their database (thanks!), we can build programmatic links.
interoperability and interoperability.
repository backing; social extensibility.

questions?
thanks!
contact: axfelix@gmail.com/ @axfelix
http://pkp.sfu.ca
PLoS stats from http://jasonpriem.com

Beyond pdfgarnett2011

by Alex Garnett

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