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The NIH Public Access Policy says “When citing their NIH-funded articles in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, authors must include the PubMed Central reference number for each article” and the FAQ provides some examples of this: Examples: Varmus H, Klausner R, Zerhouni E, Acharya T, Daar A, Singer P. 2003. PUBLIC HEALTH: Grand Challenges in Global Health. Science 302(5644): 398-399. PMCID: 243493 Zerhouni, EA. (2003) A New Vision for the National Institutes of Health.

BISG and BIC have published a discussion paper called “The identification of digital book content” - https://web.archive.org/web/20090920075334/http://www.bisg.org/docs/DigitalIdentifiers_07Jan08.pdf. The paper discusses ISBN, ISTC and DOI amongst other things and makes a series of recommendations which basically say to consider applying DOI, ISBN and ISTC to digital book content. The paper highlights in a positive way that DOI and ISBN are different but can work together (the idea of the “actionable ISBN” and aiding discovery of content).

Dan Cohen at Zotero reports (Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces) on a very interesting tie up that will allow researchers using Zotero to deposit content in the Internet Archive and have OCR done on scanned material for free under a two year Mellon grant. Each piece of content will be given a “permanent URI that includes a time and date stamp in addition to the URL” ( would Handle or DOI add value here?

After a busy Online Information conference, Friday was the STM Innovations Meeting in London (presentations not online yet). There was a very nice selection of tea which helped get the morning off to a good start.

Patricia Seybold kicked off with a review of Web 2.0 that mentioned lots of sites and some good case studies:

Alexander Street Press (https://alexanderstreet.com/) - user tags combined with a taxonomy.

Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net) - share presentations

Threadless (http://www.threadless.com/) - design and vote on t-shirts

The most interesting parts of the talk were the case studies of how National Instruments and Staples have built a vibrant community of customers. Staples invited top purchasers on the their site to create product categories and sales went up 30% and now they use the categorization in physical stores and customer reviews from the web are used in stores.

ACAP has released some documents outlining the use cases they will be testing and some proposed changes to the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - both robots.txt and META tags. There are some very practical proposals here to improve search engine indexing. However, the only search engine publicly participating in the project is http://www.exalead.com/ (which according to Alexa attracted 0.0043% of global internet visits over the last three months). The main docs are “ACAP pilot Summary use cases being tested”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 1”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 2”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Usage Definitions - draft for pilot testing”.

A couple of recent posts - from A couple of recent posts - from at Jefferson University and IFST at Univ of Delaware- note that the AMA and APA style guides now recommend using a DOI, if one is assigned, in a journal article citation.

A citation in the APA style with a DOI would be:

Conley, D., Pfeiffera, K. M., & Velez, M. (2007). Explaining sibling differences in achievement and behavioral outcomes: The importance of within- and between-family factors. Social Science Research36(3), 1087-1104. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2006.09.002

In the AMA style a reference would be:

Kitajima TS, Kawashima SA, Watanabe Y. The conserved kinetochore protein shugoshin protects centromeric cohesion during meiosis. Nature. 2004;427(6974):510-517. doi:10.1038/nature02312

This is great news. I haven’t looked at the full style guides but it’s not clear if information is given about linking DOIs via http://dx.doi.org/

David Shorthouse and Rod Page have developed some great tools for linking references by tying together a number of services and using the Crossref OpenURL interface amongst other things. See David’s post - Gimme That Scientific Paper Part III and Rod’s post on OpenURL and using ParaTools - “OpenURL and Spiders“.

Unfortunately our planned changes to the Crossref OpenURL interface (the 100 queries per day limit in particular) caused some concern for David (“Crossref Takes a Step Back“) - but make sure you read the comments to see my response!

We decided to drop the 100 per day query limit for the OpenURL interface and there will be no charges for non-commercial use of the interface - https://apps.crossref.org/requestaccount/

Please see the details of the IDF Annual Meeting and a related Handle System Workshop in Washington, DC on June 21 which may be of interest - http://www.crossref.org/crweblog/2007/06/international_doi_foundation_a.html

IOP has created an instance of the arXiv repository called eprintweb.org at https://web.archive.org/web/20130803071935/http://eprintweb.org/S/. What’s the difference from arXiv? From the eprinteweb.org site - “We have focused on your experience as a user, and have addressed issues of navigation, searching, personalization and presentation, in order to enhance that experience. We have also introduced reference linking across the entire content, and enhanced searching on all key fields, including institutional address.”

The site looks very good and it’s interesting to see a publisher developing a service directly engaging with a repository.

Due to spam the comments and trackbacks were turned off on the blog since last week. Comments can be moderated so they have now been turned back on. Glad to see postings picking up.