Guest Post - Putting Publications into Context with the DocMaps Framework for Editorial Metadata - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Trust in academic journal articles is based on similar expectations. Journals carry out editorial processes from peer review to plagiarism checks. But these processes are highly heterogeneous in how, when, and by whom they are undertaken. In many cases, it’s not always readily apparent to the outside observer that they take place at all. And as new innovations in peer review and the open research movement lead to new experiments in how we produce and distribute research products, understanding what events take place is an increasingly important issue for publishers, authors, and readers alike.

With this in mind, the DocMaps project (a joint effort of the Knowledge Futures Group, ASAPbio, and TU Graz, supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute), has been working with a Technical Committee to develop a machine-readable, interoperable and extensible framework for capturing valuable context about the processes used to create research products such as journal articles. This framework is being designed to capture as much (or little) contextual data about a document as desired by the publisher: from a minimum assertion that an event took place, to a detailed history of every edit to a document...."