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OCLC has published a report (PDF) identifying some requirements for what they call a “Cooperative Identities Hub”. A quick glance through it seems to show that the use cases focus on what we are calling the “Knowledge Discovery” use cases. As I mentioned in my interview with Martin Fenner, there is also a category of “authentication” use cases that I think needs to be addressed by a contributor identifier system. Still, this is a good report that highlights many of the complexities that an identifier system needs to address.

Martin Fenner continues his interest in the subject of author identifiers. He recently posted an online poll asking people some specific questions about how they would like to see an author identifier implemented.* The results of the poll are in and, though the sample was very small, the results are interesting. The responses are both gratifying -there seems to be a general belief that Crossref has a roll to play here- and perplexing -most think the identifier needs to identify other “contributors” to the scholarly communications process- yet there seems to be a preference for the moniker “digital author identifier”.

So while doing some background reading today I realized that legal citations already widely support a form of “citation typing” in the form of “Introductory Signals“. The 10 introductory signals break down as follows… In support of an argument: 1) [no signal]. (NB that, apparently, this is increasingly deprecated.) 2) accord; 3) see; 4) see also; 5) cf.; For Comparisons: 6) compare … with …; For contradiction: 7) but see;

I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.* Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the “typed link”, a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his 1983 Ph.D. thesis.. Basically, Trigg points out something that should be fairly obvious- a citation (i.

Discussions around “contributor Ids” (aka “Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that Crossref has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data. Well, I’m delighted to say that said group of researchers(at the GEN2PHEN project) have created a “Researcher Identification Primer” website in which they outline the many use-cases and issues around creating a mechanism for unambiguously identifying and/or authenticating researchers.

Over the past few months there seems to have been a sharp upturn in general interest around implementing an “author identifier” system for the scholarly community. This, in turn, has meant that more people have been getting in touch with us about our nascent “Contributor ID” project. The other day, after seeing my comments in the above thread, Martin Fenner asked if he could interview me about the issue of author identifiers for his blog on Nature Networks, Gobbledygook.

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing Crossref DOIs integrated in an iPhone app. Alex has just posted a preview video of the iPhone application and it includes a cameo appearance by a DOI. Yay.

So the other day Noel O’Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the Crossref APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year.

Crossref is hiring an R&D software engineer to work in our Oxford office. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on wide range of projects that promise to revolutionize scholarly publishing.

I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at Crossref- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?