Blog

Posts on content, data, and the history of scientific publishing

Rob Schrauwen

Posts adapted from thirty years of internal editorials, edited for an external
audience. All posts show their original writing date; they were published here
starting in August 2026.

I have always used spaced en-dashes – that's not a sign of AI at work.

2 August 2026Are we helping book authors and editors? Filling coverage gaps doesn't make a good data product if the underlying model is built for journals
2 August 2026Is an editorial an editorial? Model the content, not the words – the central lesson of content modelling, applied to document types
2 August 2026Twenty years of Tag by Tag The printed XML documentation that standardised scientific publishing – and what comes after it
2 August 2026A fine line between data cleansing and data laundering The principle of faithful exhibit capture – and why correcting the input is the wrong answer
2 August 2026Content modelling = modelling the content The central lesson from thirty years of practice – model what the content says, not what the world should look like
2 August 2026Profile-ready entities Why technical entity definitions and user-facing profile pages don't always map one-to-one
2 August 2026Abstracts are en vogue again Decades of neglect in the secondary database – now amplified by AI
2 August 2026Validation by the producer, verification by the consumer A principle learned the hard way in the 1990s – and still worth repeating
2 August 2026CP/LD, and a bit of history A new NISO standard prompts a look at thirty years of content standards – and what comes next
2 August 2026Acting on errata A broadcast correction from the paper era – and why databases should actually apply it
2 August 2026Keep an eye on the prize The arguments used to justify each technology transition are usually things we could already do – the real reasons lie elsewhere
2 August 2026How data products lead the way for quality Measuring capability quality instead of data product quality is how we fool ourselves
2 August 2026The mother of all metrics How long does it take to find a data error? That number is too low – and it reveals a deeper problem
2 August 2026The beauty of minigraphs A worked example showing what goes wrong with a single XML file – and how minigraphs fix it
2 August 2026Data mottos worth repeating Some short rules that have guided content and data work for decades – and why ISO standards often violate them
2 August 2026Content modernization starts with content, not systems The general mindset is towards systems modernization – but users are waiting for modernized content
2 August 2026The two dimensions of content Analytics and presentation impose completely different requirements on the same data
2 August 2026Minigraphs A canvas plus annotations – a better way to structure scholarly content
2 August 2026Exhibit A How a PhD photograph explains probabilistic knowledge representation