NYC BAPI 2011 Speaker Presentation

1. Business of APIs Conference – Oct 2011
APIs and Science Publishing
Nature.com
Chandran Honour
25 Oct 2011

2. Overview
- Intro
- About Nature Publishing (3 mins)
- Science Publishing (3 mins)
- NPG Developer Community (3mins)
- Questions (3 mins)

3. 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)"

4. 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

5. First Issue of Nature

6. Nature Publishing - Timeline
Nature.com launched - 1995
–
Tim Berners Lee invents Web - 1990

7. 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

9. 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

10. Google Gadget for Nature.com search

11. Creative Mashups using PubMed API
Nature Blogs + Circos
With self-citations External citations only

13. Visualizing Neuroscience Blog Citations
Nature Blogs + Circos
With self-citations External citations only

14. 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

15. The Developer Portal

16. API Business Model – Developer Tiers
Tier 3 – commercial developers – bespoke
.
Tier 2 – non-commercial re-use developers- keyed/rate limited bundles
Tier 1 – non-commercial developers - keyed/unlimited
- research developers want to build apps but not monetise them
Tier 0- keyless - public access
– meta-data (search results, abstracts provided by opensearch),
lists of links (e.g blogs aggregation) and RSS feeds

17. 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.)

18. 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.

19. 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

20. Questions and Answers
 ...