Page:Finch Group report.pdf/25

 available on mobile devices including smartphones, tablets and e-book readers, where PDF formats are not appropriate. In this way they are responding to the growing demand for the content they publish to be delivered through a range of devices, at any time or place.

3.16. Publishers, libraries, aggregators and others, including the general search engines such as Google, have also invested heavily to ensure that researchers and others can easily discover and navigate their way around the huge volumes of research content that are now available online. Readers can thus discover and gain access to content through a wide range of ‘gateway’ services, as well as through publisher platforms; and services such as citation linking and chaining are underpinned by the allocation of persistent identifiers (in the form of digital object identifiers (DOIs)) managed by the CrossRef organisation.

3.17. These developments have been accompanied by huge investment in systems to manage the flows of information along the various supply chains in the research communications system: between authors, publishers, aggregators, subscription agents, libraries, end-users and so on. Developing systems and standards to facilitate effective and more open flows of metadata continue to be the focus of much effort, along with systems to generate consistent and more sophisticated information about users and usage. Access under licence has also required considerable investment in systems to manage such access; libraries and publishers have joined in establishing systems to authenticate and authorise users so that they can gain access to the published content they are entitled to read; and to ensure that they are not denied access free at the point of use when that is indeed what they are entitled to. Libraries have also invested considerable sums in systems to identify and track the digital resources for which they have purchased licences. And both libraries and publishers are investing considerable sums in systems to track levels and patterns of usage. All the infrastructural costs associated with licensing regimes are reflected in the prices charged by publishers, and also in the costs borne by libraries not only in subscriptions but in operating expenses.

3.18. Recently there have also been moves by some publishers—along with much experimentation from members of the research community—towards using Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance journal articles in ways which some have termed ‘semantic publishing’. This has included enriching the text by providing interactive figures and ‘semantic lenses’ which turn a table into a graph, or animate a diagram; providing links to definitions of terms or concepts, or to additional information about such terms, or about relevant people or organisations; direct links to all cited references; access to the data within the article in actionable form, and links to the full datasets that underlie the article; and machine-readable metadata. The aim of enriching articles in such ways is to render the information and knowledge contained in and relating to the article easier to discover, analyse, extract, combine and re-use.