presentation delivered on behalf of the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca) at Beyond the PDF in San Diego, January 2011.

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

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

3. 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.

4. 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?

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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?

10. 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.)

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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

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