Blog

Since last month’s threads (here, here, here and here) talking about the issues involved in making the DOI a first-class identifier for linked data applications, I’ve had the chance to actually sit down with some of the thread’s participants (Tony Hammond, Leigh Dodds, Norman Paskin) and we’ve been able sketch-out some possible scenarios for migrating the DOI into a linked data world. I think that several of us were struck by how little actually needs to be done in order to fully address virtually all of the concerns that the linked data community has expressed about DOIs.

Tony’s recent thread on making DOIs play nicely in a linked data world has raised an issue I’ve meant to discuss here for some time- a lot of the thread is predicated on the idea that Crossref DOIs are applied at the abstract “work” level. Indeed, that it what it currently says in our guidelines. Unfortunately, this is a case where theory, practice and documentation all diverge. When the Crossref linking system was developed it was focused primarily on facilitating persistent linking amongst journals and conference proceedings.

Was outraged (outraged, I tell you) that one of my favorite online comics, PhD, didn’t include DOIs in their recent bibliography of Christmas-related citations.. So I’ve compiled them below. We care about these things so that you don’t have to. Bet you will sleep better at night knowing this. Or perhaps not… A Christmas Reading List… with DOIs. Citation: Biggs, R, Douglas, A, Macfarlane, R, Dacie, J, Pitney, W, Merskey, C & O’Brien, J, 1952, ‘Christmas Disease’, BMJ, vol.

In order to encourage publishers and other content producers to embed metadata into their PDFs, we have released an experimental tool called “pdfmark”, This open source tool allows you to add XMP metadata to a PDF. What’s really cool, is that if you give the tool a Crossref DOI, it will lookup the metadata in Crossref and then apply said metadata to the PDF. More detail can be found on the pdfmark page on the Crossref Labs site.

Inspired by Google’s recent promotion of QR Codes, I thought it might be fun to experiment with encoding a Crossref DOI and a bit of metadata into one of the critters. I’ve put a short write-up of the experiment on the Crossref Labs site, which includes a demonstration of how you can generate a QR Code for any given Crossref DOI. Put them on postcards and send them to your friends for the holidays.

We’re pleased to announce that a Crossref working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds. Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one <dc:creator> element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.

The other day Noel O’Boyle wrote to tell me that he had updated the Ubiquity plug-in that we had developed in order to to make it work with the latest version of Firefox. The problem was, I had *also* updated the Ubiquity plug-in, but I hadn’t really indicated to anybody how they could find updates to the plug-in. /me=embarrassed. So it seemed time to provide a home for some of the prototypes and experiments that we’ve been developing at Crossref.

OK, so this has nothing to do with any Crossref projects- but there is an interesting new PRC report out by Mark Ware in which he explores how SMEs (small/medium-sized enterprises) make use of scholarly articles and whether the scholarly publishing industry is doing anything to make their lives easier. This is a topic that is close to my heart. For the past few years I’ve been saying (most recently at SSP09) that I think scholarly publishers are much too quick to dismiss the possibility of creating an iTunes-like service for scholarly publications (aka “iPub”).

We are looking to hire an R&D Developer in our Oxford offices. We are look for somebody who: Is passionate about creating tools for online scholarly communication. Relishes working with metadata. Has experience delivering web-based applications using agile methodologies. Wants to learn new skills and work with a variety of programming languages. Enjoys working with a small, geographically dispersed team. Groks mixed-content model XML. Groks RDF. Groks REST. Has explored MapReduce-based database systems.

Allen Renear and Carole Palmer have just published an article titled “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing” in the current issue of Science (http://0-dx-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1126/science.1157784). I’m particularly happy to see this paper published because I actually got to witness the genesis of these ideas in my living room back in 2006. Since then, Allen and Carole’s ideas have profoundly influenced my thinking on the application of technology to scholarly communication.