RSS feeds used by publishers

One of my current tasks is working on tools to index publications in order to find scientific names. One of the first things to figure out is how to discover publications. Many publishers provide various RSS feeds for their latest issue(s), a feature that uBio RSS is making use of, scanning about 980 journal feeds as of today.

I am trying to put some recommendations together for publishers on how to encode their RSS feeds or to use other formats to make their digital publications discoverable. If you have any recommendations I'd be glad to know about them. Especially on how to best promote back catalogues of all available publications would be interesting, as RSS feeds natively only show the latest ones (there are paging extensions for Atom, but that has no widespread support). Sitemaps or OAI-PMH seem like a good candidate, although something easier than OAI would be preferred.

Wondering which RSS format is most widely used by publishers currently and which extensions they use to encode their metadata, I wrote a little tool today that reads all current feeds known to ubio and checks their rss format, here are the results, not analyzing the namespaces and extension formats yet:

rss_0.92 = 3
rss_1.0 = 336
rss_2.0 = 431
rss_0.91U = 6
atom_1.0 = 2

So clearly the rdf based rss 1.0 (often together with Prism) and the simple rss 2.0 format is used mostly.
If there only would be a simple way to page. Maybe Microsofts Simple Sharing Extensions could help?