When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.
By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.
It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.
Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd
The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.
Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability. Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.
We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia.
This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references. Crossref will support the development and maintenance of Wikipedia’s citation tools on Wikipedia. This work will include bug fixes and performance improvements for existing tools, extending the tools to enable Wikipedia contributors to more easily look up and insert DOIs, and providing a “linkback” mechanism that alerts relevant parties when a persistent identifier is used in a Wikipedia reference.
In addition, Crossref is creating the role of Wikimedia Ambassador (modeled after Wikimedian-in-Residence) to act as liaison with the Wikimedia community, promote use of scholarly references on Wikipedia, and educate about DOIs and other scholarly identifiers (ORCIDs, PubMed IDs, DataCite DOIs, etc) across Wikimedia projects.
Starting today, Crossref will be working with Daniel Mietchen to coordinate Crossref’s Wikimedia-related activities. Daniel’s team will be composed of Max Klein and Matt Senate, who will work to enhance Wikimedia citation tools, and will share the role of Wikipedia ambassador with Dorothy Howard.
Since the beginnings of Wikipedia, Daniel Mietchen has worked to integrate scholarly content into Wikimedia projects. He is part of an impressive community of active Wikipedians and developers who have worked extensively on linking Wikipedia articles to the formal literature and other scholarly resources. We’ve been talking to him about this project for nearly a year, and are happy to finally get it off the ground.
-G
]7 Matt, Max and Daniel at #wikimania2014. Photo by Dorothy.