‘Document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context.’²

Publishing standards

We don’t often give much thought to the design and production elements of a book or journal, except possibly in noticing their absence. Things like page numbers, binding, title pages, indices, paper, font styles and basic page design structures are taken for granted, but all are examples of different types of standards that most publishers adhere to voluntarily. Although these practices are not frequently enshrined in formal documents, in a way that matches the ISO’s definition, they are an ever-present element of publishing production, library management or the reading experience.

Many standards that have played a critical role for centuries in printed book and journal production and content distribution need to be reconsidered and adapted to the digital content environment. One good example of this is page numbering, which began as a production system for keeping plates and the subsequently produced sheets of paper in the correct order for binding the book. Today in an era of digital content with reflowable text – where the end-user can adjust the typeface, font or other traditionally fixed elements – the concept of a page number is nearly meaningless. And yet readers still rely on page numbering because it has become a useful system beyond its original production purpose. In part, pages are important because reading is often a social activity; while the act of reading may not itself be social, readers frequently want to share what they have read and discuss it with others.

Page numbers are a way of referencing something within a book or journal within that social context. This is especially true in the scholarly world, where citations and referencing content are critical elements in the process of research and publication. So even though the electronic format of content does away with the structural need for physical page numbers, a need still exists for some citation point that can be used for referencing.

This is an example of why standards development is so critical in the ongoing transition to digital content. In the coming years, standards development organizations (SDOs) will need to work through many similar issues to ensure new technologies are functional, appropriately usable and fully capable of supplementing or replacing their print counterparts. Much work has already been done to develop needed standards for electronic content, as this chapter will illustrate; but much more remains to be done.

Types of standards

There are a variety of ways in which people and organizations develop consensus around standards or best practices. These can range from completely independent, driven by the ‘free hand of the market’ to the extremely formal, driven by organizations focused specifically on the creation of standards. Both the method of development and the formality of the process used to develop the resulting standard determine its type. The two main recognized types of standards are de facto and de jure.

A de facto standard is one that has become accepted in practice but has not undergone any formal process to obtain consensus and may not even have publicly available documentation. Typically, de facto standards result from marketplace domination or practice. In the publishing world, page numbering, as discussed above, is an example of a de facto standard. A de jure standard is one that is developed through a formal process, usually managed by an official SDO. These standards typically require that the following principles be met (adapted from American National Standards Institute’s Essential Requirements):³

Compliance with both de facto and de jure standards is voluntary. However, in some cases, de jure standards can be cited by legal code or regulation, which could make it mandatory to follow in the affected legal jurisdiction.

In some cases, a de facto standard is taken through a formal standards process and thereby becomes a de jure standard. One recent example is Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), which after many years as a de facto standard in the marketplace became an international standard (ISO 32000-1⁴) in 2008.

Standards development organizations

The community of organizations that create standards is a complex one, operating at industry, national and international levels. Most countries have a national standards-setting body, sometimes independent or non-governmental and sometimes formed and/or authorized by the government. Examples of such national bodies are the American National Standards Institute⁵ (ANSI) in the US, the British Standards Institution⁶ (BSI) in the UK, the Deutsches Institut fur Normung⁷ (DIN) in Germany, the Association Frangaise de Normalisation⁸ (AFNOR) in France and the Standardization Administration of China⁹ (SAC).

The primary international standards body for publishing-related standards is the ISO.¹⁰ ISO’s voting members are the national standards bodies ‘most representative of standardization in [their] country’.¹¹ ISO divides their standards work into Technical Committee (TCs), each of which has responsibility for a particular subject area and are identified by an ascending number scheme. A number of the standards related to electronic content, such as the International Standard Book Number (ISBN),¹² the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)¹³ and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI),¹⁴ are developed by TC 46 – Information and documentation.¹⁵ A joint committee – JTC1, Information Technology¹⁶ – of ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is responsible for many of the standards related to format specifications and computer interactions, such as the JPEG 2000 image coding system.¹⁷ National participation in this process is organized differently in each participating country, but most countries use some form of ‘mirroring committee’ of national experts to provide input into the relevant ISO work.

Currently within the US, there are over 200 ANSI-accredited SDOs¹⁸ developing American National Standards in everything from manufacturing and safety to libraries and publishing. For electronic content, some of the key developers are: the Association for Information and Image Management¹⁹ (AIIM), the National Information Standards Organization²⁰ (NISO), ARMA International²¹ and the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards²² (INCITS).

A number of other SDOs exist outside of the formal international and national bodies discussed above. Two international standards organizations, created specifically for internet- and web-related standards, are the Internet Society²³ [responsible for the Internet Engineering Task Force²⁴ (IETF)] and the World Wide Web Consortium²⁵ (W3C).

Many trade or professional organizations have one or more committees developing standards and guidelines in areas of interest to their members. Within the e-publishing world, examples of such organizations include: the American Library Association²⁶ (ALA), the Book Industry Study Group²⁷ (BISG), EDItEUR,²⁸ the International Digital Enterprise Alliance²⁹ (IDEAlliance), the International Digital Publishing Forum³⁰ (IDPF), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions³¹ (IFLA), the National Federation of Advanced Information Services³² (NFAIS) and United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG).³³

Some organizations form consortiums for the purpose of collaborating on the development of standards, such as the DAISY Consortium,³⁴ the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR),³⁵ the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)³⁶ and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards³⁷ (OASIS).

Government agencies may also develop standards as part of their mission. In the US the National Institute of Standards and Technology³⁸ (NIST) develops standards in a wide variety of areas to further US innovation and industrial competitiveness. The Library of Congress³⁹ has developed numerous standards related to libraries, metadata and preservation.

What should be apparent from this SDO discussion is that there is no lack of organizations developing standards. Because the lines are not always clear where one organization’s mission ends and another begins, there is often overlap and conflicts in the resulting standards. Most SDOs, though, are good at working together on areas of common interest and will try to stay abreast of each others’ activities and collaborate whenever possible. However, it is not unusual to encounter situations where two organizations develop competing or incongruent standards due to either a lack of awareness of the other’s work, ‘forum shopping’ (when developers try to find a receptive community), or to suit the specific needs of a particular community that could be somewhat different from those of another community.

Structure and markup standards

One basis for understanding the need for structuring and marking up content is the simple fact that machines do not have the same level of understanding of nuances and inferences that human beings do. A person glancing at the title page of a book can easily tell which text is the title, which is the author and which is the publisher. A computer must have explicit markings to understand which text is which.

There are several benefits to producing content in structured content formats. The first of these is that it is easy to change the presentation of structured documents through the use of style sheets. In this way, the same content can be transformed from one page layout to another, for example, or from one screen size or rendering to another. This allows a publisher to produce a single source file for multiple final formats and reduces overall production costs. This capability is increasingly important as new rendering technologies and new mobile devices are constantly coming onto the market. Platform-agnostic file structures also aid in long-term preservation as they can be more easily migrated to new formats to prevent future obsolescence. Finally, structured content provides opportunities for both enriching or re-using content for a different publication or purpose, for example a teacher and student version of a textbook, a book compilation of journal articles, a web ‘mash-up’ of content or a multimedia version of a textual book. Increasingly, publishers are also exploring ways to semantically enrich content by linking words, phrases or references to other additional materials outside of the text. It is far easier to add links to references and terms or to add other tags and annotations using structured content than it is through more fixed formats, such as a PDF.

Identification standards

We use identifiers to distinguish things from one another (disambiguation) and to serve as a shorthand way of referring to the item. Ideally, every content item would have at least one unique identifier that applies to it and only to it. Because identifiers are used for different purposes, many items may have multiple identifiers. A book, for example, could be assigned an ISBN by the publisher and also receive a call number by a library that adds the book to its collection.

Description standards

Metadata, often called data about data or information, are used to describe, explain, locate or otherwise make it easier to retrieve, use or manage an information resource.⁶¹ The metadata we choose to describe a thing are often for a specific purpose. When one is buying a journal, for example, the title, price, frequency of publication, and the address of the publisher where the payment should be sent are each relevant and critical data elements for that transaction. This can be contrasted with the back-end production metadata required for long-term electronic archiving of the journal, such as file format, creation application, encoding system, embedded fonts and color space.⁶²

These collective distinctions about metadata, describing a thing and the classes of things, are based on a concept called functional granularity, which refers to the need to provide as much information as is needed to conduct a specific task. To conduct a purchase transaction, one must know the price. However, in the context of preservation, price is an irrelevant data element. Alternatively, knowing the title and author of a book might be sufficient in a rights transaction, but the size, shape and weight of a particular copy would be important to a shipping fee calculation. Curating metadata is a time-consuming and expensive investment, which often requires a business rationale to justify this investment. If there is no need to create or maintain metadata for a particular purpose, then it doesn’t make sense to invest the significant costs required to maintain it. The challenge, however, is that one may not know all of the future needs related to the content item. For this reason there is no simple rule for what is the appropriate metadata quality or detail level.

Distribution and delivery standards

Once content is created it needs to find its way out of the publisher’s production department and through a supply chain of distributors, possibly libraries, and finally into the hands of a reader. In a print environment, this process included printing the content, as well as warehousing and then shipping physical copies of the book to a retailer or end-user. In a digital environment, content is similarly produced, but packaging and distribution takes place in quite different ways and different and additional distributors are involved in the process.

The format of these digital files has been shifting quickly since electronic content distribution first became available. In the early days of electronic distribution, content was distributed as simple text files. These eventually were transformed into more complex structured documents, to digitally recreate the ‘page’ format and Adobe’s PDF became a de facto standard for delivering a facsimile of the page as it had appeared in print. PDF eventually became an international standard as noted above.⁴ Many publishers are now providing content directly via the World Wide Web in HTML format via their website and in various e-reader formats through third-party providers.

As content distribution has grown in complexity and the variety of devices on which content needs to be rendered has increased, there has developed a need for a common distribution format. The EPUB specification is the leading contender to resolve this challenge.

Authentication standards

Publishers who license or sell subscriptions to their electronic content are interested in managing access to that content. There are a variety of systems for limiting access based on some form of end-user credentials, authentication of IP addresses or through use of proxy servers. All of these methods have drawbacks particularly with the increasing desire of users to access resources remotely and from mobile devices. As organizations, such as libraries, that license the content add more and more content from multiple providers, the maintenance of authentication credentials becomes more onerous. End-users may be faced with the situation of having to re-authenticate every time they change from one content collection to another. Balancing ease of use and security is the biggest challenge in selecting an authentication method.

Reference and linking standards

For many decades, the only content available online were abstract and indexing databases and full text still had to be delivered on paper, usually at an additional cost to the end-user, and always with a delay. As more content, especially journals, became available online, the issue became how to redirect the end-user from their search result to the full-text content, especially when there were many databases and collections involved from different content providers. Reference and linking standards were the solution, allowing interoperability between disparate systems.

Preservation standards

Preservation is an activity that ‘future proofs’ content. While preserving physical items entails a lot of environmental attributes, such as acid levels, humidity and temperature, the range of possibilities with digital preservation fall broadly into four levels of very different preservation activities.

The first level of preservation of digital content relies on the physical preservation of the bits that comprise the document. This could be done using a variety of media, from hard disks, to flash drives, to computer hard drives or even network drives. You then need a technological layer of preservation, which means that you need to preserve not only the physical media, but also some method of reading or extracting the content from the storage device. The next layer of preservation is a formatting layer, where software must be available that can render the extracted files. Finally, there is a semantic layer of preservation, which ensures the rendered content has not been altered through the transformation process.

The process of preservation relies heavily on standards adherence to allow for content preservation. The creation of metadata describing the technical and format structures is crucial to understanding the form, structure and rights related to a content object. The PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata⁸⁷ defines preservation metadata as ‘the information a repository uses to support the digital preservation process’.

The common file structures for creating and distributing content, described previously, will also help to ensure preservation of content and simplify the software needs to re-create content in its original form. There are models for how content should be replicated and stored and many projects, such as LOCKSS⁸⁸ and CLOCKSS,⁸⁹ build on network replication to ensure long-term availability of content. Finally, there are social and organizational structures related to long-term preservation, such as the creation of organizations like Portico,⁹⁰ whose mission is to actively pursue the preservation of content in partnership with publishers and libraries.

Non-traditional media content in digital form

Most journals today are distributed in electronic form and take advantage of the possibilities provided by digital distribution by adding citation linking (see DOI and OpenURL above), animated images, video, audio, extended tables, data sets or other related content, which does not fit within the construct of a print journal. Authors began to see the value in these new forms and began submitting this supplemental material along with their articles. Some publishers welcomed these submittals to enhance their electronic journal offerings⁹¹ while others were at a loss as to what to do with this content.

The rapid increase in this non-traditional content is straining even the electronic distribution publication model because of the time, effort and skills necessary to vet these additional materials, the specialized software and practices needed to distribute and store them, and questions about the responsibility for long-term preservation. Some publishers have declared they would no longer accept supplemental materials (e.g. Maunsell, 2010) with journal articles or are limiting what can be submitted (e.g. Borowski, 2011). Still other journals are mandating the availability of supplemental materials, such as data sets, be open and publically available. Several grant-funding agencies are also requiring that data generated as a result of funded research be made accessible. Whether these materials will find their ways into the publication process remains an open question, but certainly linking at a minimum and more likely interoperation at some level will be required.

To help address these issues, a joint NISO and NFAIS working group⁹² is exploring the business practices and technological infrastructure needs for Supplemental Journal Article Materials. The question of what constitutes supplemental materials is one factor that is critical to understanding any standard practices and was the first step in the group’s project. This working group is expected to issue their recommended practices for publishers to handle these supplemental materials by the end of 2011.

Traditional journal articles with supplemental information are only one part of a much larger challenge related to the increasing reliance on data in the scientific process. New forms of publications are developing, such as ‘data papers’, which are simply available data sets with some associated metadata. The entire realm of data management, data citation and data reuse is fraught with complicated questions, which will require significant study and standards development. For example, traditional provenance questions need to be addressed, such as: Who created this data set? How can we be assured that the data set hasn’t been altered or manipulated since its release or publication? If the data are a sub-set of a larger data collection, how was that subset created, and can it be recreated? If a data set is constantly being updated with new data, how can we return to the state of the database at the time the initial query was run, as new data may influence the results of an analytical tool?

There are a variety of communities looking at these questions. A W3C Provenance Incubator Group published a state-of-the art paper with a roadmap for possible standardization efforts.⁹³ Another group organized by the CODATA organization in partnership with the International Council on Scientific & Technical Information (ICSTI) is exploring the issue of data citation practices.⁹⁴ Other groups have conducted surveys of researchers (Tenopir et al., 2011) and of institutional repository practice (Soehner et al., 2010). The Data Cite⁹⁵ organization is working with some of the largest repository providers to develop standards for the application of DOIs to data sets and developing institutional best practices regarding data preservation and sharing. Finally, the semantic web community is working to provide linking opportunities⁹⁶ to connect disparate data sets and expand the ability to reuse and mash up heterogeneous data sets.

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