Article Review: The Role of RSS in Science Publishing

Overview
Hammond, Hannay and Lund’s article “The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web” is an excellent look at RSS, its current and potential uses by publishers and some of the technical issues associated with it.  The Authors are all employed by the Nature Publishing Group and involved in RSS development (Hammond, Hannay & Lund, 2004)

The article can be broadly broken up into two sections.  The first section deals mostly with defining RSS (an acronym that has many different definitions), and looking at how the scientific publishing industry, specifically the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), has been using RSS and the possible future uses of RSS.  The second section, which is mainly technical, discusses how RSS compares to other syndication technologies and NPG’s development of the Urchin RSS aggregator.  Due to space considerations this paper will focus on the first, and in my opinion, most important section of the paper.

One of the first things the reader notices in the first section of this article is that the authors take the time to work from essentially first principles, explaining what RSS is and where the technology sits today.  This was useful because in our class readings on RSS there was never really a clear indication that the different specifications of RSS had different meanings (Lewin, 2000).  This oversight is easy to understand, as some primers on the subject never even bother to expand on the acronym RSS (see Pilgrim, 2002).  The article shows that those who would expand RSS as “Really Simple Syndication” typically use the RSS 2.0 specification, which was the specification used in our RSS activity and provides a minimum amount of metadata (Hammond, Hannay & Lund, 2004, ¶4).  Those who define RSS as RDF Site Summary typically use the RSS 1.0 specification.  This specification allows for an increased amount of metadata as the RDF (Resource Descriptive Framwork) can be modified to include anything the publisher sees fit (Hammond, Hannay & Lund, 2004, ¶4).  NPG uses RSS 1.0 because of the additional informational needs of their users.

The most interesting section for those who are interested in metadata follows from the above discussion.  The authors discuss using the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM), which is essentially an expanded version of the Dublin Core scheme that is more suited to the periodical publishing industry, in their RSS feed.  The most interesting thing about this discussion is that the authors show how they have helped in the evolution of this scheme by successfully lobbying to include certain elements, like e-ISSN and endingPage, which are of particular relevance to the scientific publishing community (Hammond, Hannay & Lund, 2004, ¶9-10).  The authors then compare what metadata they and their competitors are including in their RSS feeds and what they are syndicating.  They find that “[b]eyond providing a basic alerting service, we note that science publishers are also offering RSS feeds for a whole range of other news services—jobs, product data, events, etc.” (Hammond, Hannay & Lund, 2004, ¶15-16; Table 1).

Why Do They Care?
The authors spend only a brief paragraph discussing why NPG should syndicate their content but it is quite illuminating.  They provide three reasons: firstly, RSS allows them to “increase the surface area of our website and to project that presence across the Web”; secondly there is “downstream potential for generating advertising revenue”; and lastly, in the hopes that RSS will create new applications and thus more routes to NPG’s content (Hammond, Hannay & Lund, 2004, ¶19).  Of these three reasons the second is by far the most interesting.  One can only wonder about the advertising potential of RSS since it is essentially an opt-in technology.  Unlike email, where anyone can contact you if they know your address, RSS feeds have to be subscribed to and I have my doubts as to how many people would want to subscribe to a feed that subjects them to a stream of advertisements.

Problems
The major problem with this article for me is that the second section of the article is really quite different from the first.  Though quite interesting, I feel it should have been it’s own article.  The technology comparisons between RSS, ICE (Information Content Exchange) and OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) was interesting, but in my opinion was unnecessary as neither ICE nor OAI were being discussed in the realm of scientific publishing, which had been the focus of the first part of the paper.  The last bit about their RSS aggregator, Urchin, was interesting, but in this case would have been better served by a separate article (or maybe a sales brochure).

Why You Should Read This Article
This article is great because it works at different levels.  The authors use plain language and as mentioned earlier start from the basics.  Moreover, they make judicious use of notes and their references are fantastic, expertly pointing readers to more in depth resources.  For people who know a little more about XML and metadata they show bits of their RDF implementation, and provide some technical explanations.

This article should also provide some food for thought for librarians, for this technology has two important ramifications for them.  The first and most obvious consequence for libraries is that they as content providers are probably going to have to start collecting RSS feeds from publishers and modifying them so patrons can get access to any subscription based content, or at the very least providing some method of making sure that any of their users who subscribe to an RSS feed can access content relatively seamlessly.  The second and less obvious consequence is the effect of these feeds on the usage patterns of patrons.  Will the proliferation of RSS lead to a decrease in the number of people who actually come to the library to view the paper copy?  With more and more journals being online it is possible to fully research a subject with out going to the library, one can only assume that with RSS constantly feeding updates to users this trend would intensify.

Conclusion
This article is should be read by everyone in this class.  It is a perfect illustration of why so many of the concepts we talk about in class are important and shows new ways that RSS is being used in the real world.  


References:
Hammond, T., Hannay, T., & Lund, B. (2004). The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web. D-Lib Magazine, 10(12). Retrieved November 12, 2005, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html.

Lewin, J. (2000). An introduction to RSS news feeds: Using open formats for content syndication.  Retrieved November 12, 2005, from http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-rss.html.

Pilgrim, M. (2002).  What is RSS? Retrieved November 12, 2005, from http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html.



****Update: Maria has reviewed the same article her review can be found here.