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Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales.

In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported. First off, if you’d like to try citation formatting without using content negotiation, there’s a simple web UI that allows input of a DOI, style and locale selection. If you’re more into accessing the web via your favorite programming language, have a look at these content negotiation curl examples. To make a request for the new “text/bibliography” record type: $ curl -LH “Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex” http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 @article{Atkins_Gershell_2002, title={From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs}, volume={1}, DOI={10.1038/nrd842}, number={7}, journal={Nature Reviews Drug Discovery}, author={Atkins, Joshua H. and Gershell, Leland J.}, year={2002}, month={Jul}, pages={491-492}} A locale can be specified with the “locale” record type parameter, like this: $ curl -LH “Accept: text/bibliography; style=mla; locale=fr-FR” http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 Atkins, Joshua H., et Leland J. Gershell. « From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs ». Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 1.7 (2002): 491-492. You may want to process metadata through CSL yourself. For this use case, there’s another new record type, “application/citeproc+json” that returns metadata in a citeproc-friendly JSON form: $ curl -LH “Accept: application/citeproc+json” http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 {“volume”:“1”,“issue”:“7”,“DOI”:“10.1038/nrd842”,“title”:“From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs”,“container-title”:“Nature Reviews Drug Discovery”,“issued”:{“date-parts”:[[2002,7]]},“author”:[{“family”:“Atkins”,“given”:“Joshua H.”},{“family”:“Gershell”,“given”:“Leland J.”}],“page”:“491-492”,“type”:“article-journal”} Finally, to retrieve lists of supported styles and locales, see:

We’ve been asked a few times if it is possible to determine whether or not a particular domain name belongs to a Crossref member. To address this we’re launching another small service that performs something like a “reverse look-up” of URLs and domain names to DOIs and Crossref member status.

The service provides an API that will attempt to reverse look-up a URL to a DOI and return the membership status (member or non-member) of the root domain of the URL. In practice resolving URLs to DOIs has substantial limitations - many publishers redirect the resolution URL of DOIs to other online content and URLs become clogged up with session IDs and other cruft appearing in their query parameters. All of this means it is unlikely that the URLs that appear to be the end result of DOI resolution are actually the URLs pointed to.

In April In April for its DOIs. At the time I cheekily called-out DataCite to start supporting content negotiation as well.

Edward Zukowski (DataCite’s resident propellor-head) took up the challenge with gusto and, as of September 22nd DataCite has also been supporting content negotiation for its DOIs. This means that one million more DOIs are now linked-data friendly. Congratulations to Ed and the rest of the team at DataCite.

We hope this is a trend. Back in June Knowledge Exchange organized a seminar on Persistent Object Identifiers. One of the outcomes of the meeting was “Den Haag Manifesto” a document outlining five relatively simple steps that different persistent identifier systems could take in order to increase interoperability. Most of these steps involved adopting linked data principles including support for content negotiation. We look forward to hearing about other persistent identifiers adopting these principles over the next year.

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.

So does anybody remember the posting DOIs and Linked Data: Some Concrete Proposals?

Well, we went with option “D.”

From now on, DOIs, expressed as HTTP URIs, can be used with content-negotiation.

Let’s get straight to the point. If you have curl installed, you can start playing with content-negotiation and Crossref DOIs right away:

curl -D - -L -H   “Accept: application/rdf+xml” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784” 

curl -D - -L -H   “Accept: text/turtle” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784”

Announcements regarding Crossref system status or changes are posted in an Announcements forum on our support portal (http://support.crossref.org). We recommend that someone from your organization monitor this forum to stay informed about Crossref system status, schema changes, or other issues affecting deposits and queries. Subscribe to this forum via RSS feed (https://support.crossref.org/hc/en-us) or select the ‘Subscribe’ option in the forum to subscribe by email.

The TWG Discussion forum replaces the TWG mailing list and can be accessed by members of the Crossref community who log in to our support portal. Intended topics include technical matters related to Crossref’s services, DOI issues and Crossref system operation.