Nascent

We're pleased to announce that Nature.com now has an OAI-PMH interface. This service implements the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting from the Open Archives Initiative. This means that the Nature.com platform can now be queried by item, by title or by date range and that structured data records will be returned. All articles from over 150 titles can be accessed and dating back to 1869 for Nature magazine.

Queries are made with a simple request URL (via HTTP GET, although POST is also supported) according to the OAI-PMH protocol. Result sets are in XML using formats defined by W3C XML Schema: either the OAI-PMH base format for metadata exchange, i.e. Dublin Core, or an enhanced bibliographic metadata format, i.e. PRISM Aggregator Message (PAM) format.

In PAM format the results are very similar to the standard article descriptions published in our RSS feeds, or embedded directly within content entities (either as META tags in HTML, or as XMP packets in PDF). Further details on our use of PAM are given in a related post on CrossTech.

The Nature.com OAI-PMH service has two access points:

User interface:

http://www.nature.com/oai

Service endpoint:

http://www.nature.com/oai/request

Special credits go to Jeff Young of OCLC for creating the excellent open-source OAICat software package, and to Nawab Siddiqui of Nature Publishing Group for doing all the heavy lifting in implementing this service for Nature.com.