Blog

I’m a co-founder with rOpenSci, a non-profit that focuses on making software to facilitate reproducible and open science. Back in 2013 we started to make an R client working with various Crossref web services. I was lucky enough to attend last year’s Crossref annual meeting in Boston, and gave one talk on details of the programmatic clients, and another higher level talk on text mining and use of metadata for research.

Oktoberfest is in full swing and that makes me think that it’s almost Frankfurt Book Fair time again!

This year in addition to individual meetings we’ll have scheduled flash presentations on our booth, M91 in Hall 4.2. These short (10-minute) presentations are great for anyone wanting a quick intro to what Crossref is all about. Running on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday - at the following times each of those days:

Today I’m announcing a small web API that wraps a family name database here at Crossref R&D. The database, built from Crossref’s metadata, lists all unique family names that appear as contributors to articles, books, datasets and so on that are known to Crossref. As such the database likely accounts for the majority of family names represented in the scholarly record. The web API comes with two services: a family name detector that will pick out potential family names from chunks of text and a family name autocompletion system.

Over the past two weeks we’ve focused on our OpenURL query interface with the goal being to improve its reliability. I’d like to mention some things we’ve done. We now require an OpenURL account to use this interface (see the registration page) . This account is still free, there are no fixed usage limits, and the terms of use have been greatly simplified. Resources have been re-arranged dedicating more horse-power to the OpenURL function.