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Crossref is governed by a board of directors that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November. At the July meeting the board typically spends a significant amount of time on strategic planning in addition to its usual activities such as financial oversight, approving investment in new services based on staff and committee recommendations, reviewing and approving policies and fees for new and existing services and generally making sure Crossref is healthy and well run.

At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organization identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.

We have updated our DOI display guidelines as of March 2017, this month! I described the what and the why in my previous blog post New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way and in an email I wrote to all our members in September 2016. I’m pleased to say that the updated Crossref DOI display guidelines are available via this fantastic new website and are now active. Here is the URL of the full set of guidelines in case you want to bookmark it (https://doi.org/10.13003/5jchdy) and a shareable image to spread the word on social media.

Crossref was founded to enable collaboration between publishers.  As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.

The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success.  Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry.  

TL;DR

Crossref will be updating its DOI Display Guidelines within the next couple of weeks.  This is a big deal.  We last made a change in 2011 so it’s not something that happens often or that we take lightly.  In short, the changes are to drop “dx” from DOI links and to use “https:” rather than “http:”.  An example of the new best practice in displaying a Crossref DOI link is: https://doi.org/10.1629/22161

Dr Norman Paskin It was with great sadness and shock that I learned that Dr Norman Paskin had passed away unexpectedly on the 27th March. This is a big loss to the DOI, Crossref and digital information communities. Norman was the driving force behind the DOI System and was a key supporter and ally of Crossref from the start. Norman founded the International DOI Foundation in 1998 and ran it successfully until the end of 2015 when he moved to a strategic role as an Independent Board Member.

Tony’s post highlights Knol’s “service” URIs. Another issue is that many Knol entries have nice long lists of unlinked references. The HTML code behind the references is very sparse. Might the DOI be of use in linking out from these references? I think so. Then, of course, there’s the issue of DOIs for Knols…

A Crossref Member Briefing is available that explains how PubMed Central (PMC) links to publisher full text, how PMC uses DOIs and how PMC should be using DOIs. The briefing is entitled “Linking to Publisher Full Text from PubMed Central” (PDF 85k). Crossref considers it very important the PMC uses DOIs as the main means to link to the publisher version of record for an article and we are recommending that publishers try to convince PMC to use DOIs in an automated way.

Further to my previous post “NIH Mandate and PMCIDs” we’ve been looking into linking to articles on publishers’ sites from PubMed Central (PMC). There are a couple of ways this happens currently (see details below) but these are complicated and will lead to broken links and more difficulty for PMC and publishers in managing the links. Crossref is going to be putting together a briefing note for its members on this soon.

The main issue we are raising with PMC, and that we will encourage publishers to raise too, is why doesn’t PMC just automatically link DOIs? Most of the articles in PMC have DOIs so this would require very little effort from PMC and no effort from publishers and would give readers a perisistent link to the publisher’s version of an article.