Joe Wass

This is a long overdue followup to 2016’s “URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship”. Like that post, this accompanies my talk at PIDapalooza, the premier festival of PIDs (Persistent Identifiers). I don’t think I need to give a spoiler warning when I tell you that it’s still complicated. But this post presents some vocabulary to describe exactly how complicated it is. Event Data has been up and running and collecting data for a couple of years now, but this post describes changes we made toward the end of 2018.

You want to hear more from us. We hear you. We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.

Hello from sunny Girona! I’m heading to PIDapalooza, the Persistent Identifier festival, as it returns for its second year. It’s all about to kick off. One of the themes this year is “bridging worlds”: how to bring together different communities and the identifiers they use. Something I really enjoyed about PIDapalooza last year was the variety of people who came. We heard about some “traditional” identifier systems (at least, it seems that way to us): DOIs for publications, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers.

I’m here in Toronto and looking forward to a busy week. Maddy Watson and I are in town for the 4:AM Altmetrics Conference, as well as the altmetrics17 workshop and Hack-day. I’ll be speaking at each, and for those of you who aren’t able to make it, I’ve combined both presentations into a handy blog post, which follows on from my last one. But first, nothing beats a good demo. Take a look at our live stream.

There’s a saying about oil, something along the lines of “you really don’t want to see how it’s made”. And whilst I’m reluctant to draw too many parallels between the petrochemical industry and scholarly publishing, there are some interesting comparisons to be drawn. Oil starts its life deep underground as an amorphous sticky substance. Prospectors must identify oil fields, drill, extract the oil and refine it. It finds its way into things as diverse as aspirin, paint and hammocks.