Business of APIs Conference – Oct 2011

APIs and Science Publishing

Nature.com

Chandran Honour

25 Oct 2011

Overview

- Intro- About Nature Publishing Group- The Publishing Industry Today – Open Access- Science API Landscape- Applications- The Developer Portal- APIS Overview- API Business Model- The Future

About Nature Publishing Group

● Small, family-owned: less than 100 journals in total● 33 ‘Nature’ titles – including 16 review titles● Magazines including Scientific American part of the ‘family’● 1000 employees in 17 offices on 5 continents● 28 society partners● 53 academic and society journals● Online services, databases, conferences/events, multimedia● We aim to be the best – not the biggest• 32% of the top 50 science journals by Impact Factor (16/50);

(2009 JCR*)• 15 NPG journals #1 in their fields by Impact Factor (2009 JCR)

*Source: 2009 Journal Citation Report, (Thomson Reuters, 2010)

About Nature Publishing: Company values

Nature’s 1869 mission statement, still guides us today:

“FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery ; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life ;

   And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time.”

As part of Macmillan, we are guided by its values

First Issue of Nature

Nature Publishing - Timeline

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Nature.com launched - 1995

Tim Berners Lee invents Web - 1990

Publishing Today – Open Access Content

Why is Open Access important? wider access and availability to the latest published research papers is the key to enabling greater collaboration amongst scientists and researchers or open science as it is known in the scientific community.

How does it work? – removing the cost of downloading the paper means that any researcher with a potential interest in the topic can down the information and use it to further their own research interests, thus increasing the impact of original paper.

How has it grown? – recent studies have shown a significant growth in the number of Open Access journals and publishers offering article search at journal level. – this now been embraced by NPG and other major publishers as a primary means to

Applications Productivity Tools

Citation management Authoring tools Lab management

Network/Impact Analysis Measuring article/author impact

Content discovery Finding relevant research

Social / Communication Apps Connecting like-minded researchers

Visualisation Other

Google Gadget for Nature.com search

Creative Mashups using PubMed API

With self-citations External citations only

Nature Blogs + Circos

Visualizing Neuroscience Blog Citations

With self-citations External citations only

Nature Blogs + Circos

The Developer Portal

➲ Overview – goals:

➲ – to provide quality data to enable the creation of new scientific applications

➲ - provide a single place for documentation and support for APIs on the web

➲ - to create a developer community to allow sharing of ideas and information

The Developer Portal

API Business Model – Developer Tiers

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Tier 0- keyless - public access – meta-data (search results, abstracts provided by opensearch),

lists of links (e.g blogs aggregation) and RSS feeds

Tier 1 – non-commercial developers - keyed/unlimited- research developers want to build apps but not monetise them

Tier 2 – non-commercial re-use developers- keyed/rate limited bundles

Tier 3 – commercial developers – bespoke

Keyed API Access via the Portal

• Keyed access – developers are required to register for API access on the portal and receive an API access key after confirming via registration link.

• Quota and rate limits are set – the portal allows configuration of quotas are rate limits based on the level of access granted (this is confgured manually for premium users and insitutional clients who agree access directly with NPG sales staff.)

APIs Overview

Opensearch – open search gateway allows querying of nature.com article meta-data and abstracts via an SRU/CQL query interface

Blogs API search and retrieval of science-related blog (meta-data), posts and related papers and journals.

The Future

Portal launch – planned for Nov 2011 http://developers.nature.com

Developer events – website launch, mailing lists, hackathon, webinars – planned for 2012

New APIs – Content – toc, articles, top content– Jobs– Events– Research highlights– Protocol Exchange (experimental know-how) – News

Questions and Answers

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