This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.
What is in this update?
Publication typing for citations
This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.
Every year we release metadata for the full corpus of records registered with us, which can be downloaded for free in a single compressed file. This is one way in which we fulfil our mission to make metadata freely and widely available. By including the metadata of over 165 million research outputs from over 20,000 members worldwide and making them available in a standard format, we streamline access to metadata about scholarly objects such as journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, research grants, standards, datasets, reports, blogs, and more.
Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organizations.
As you probably know, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led, carefully curated registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations, including funding organisations. It’s a joint initiative led by the California Digital Library, Datacite and Crossref launched in 2019 that fulfills the long-standing need for an open organisation identifier.
We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organizations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.
Skimming the headlines on Hacker News yesterday morning, I noticed something exciting. A dump of all the submissions to Reddit since 2006. “How many of those are DOIs?”, I thought. Reddit is a very broad community, but has some very interesting parts, including some great science communication. How much are DOIs used in Reddit?
If you know what a DOI is, skip this! The DOI system (Digital Object Identifier) is a link redirection service. When a publisher puts some content online they could just hand out the URL. But the URL can change, and within a very short space of time, link-rot happens. DOIs are designed to fight link rot. When a publisher mints a DOI to an article they just published, they can change the article’s URL and then update the DOI to point to the new place. DOIs are persistent. They are URLs. They’re also identifiers (kind of like ISBNs), and they’re used in scholarly publishing as to do citations.
Crossref is the DOI registration agency for scholarly publishing. That means mostly things like journal articles. There are other registration agencies, for example, DataCite, who do DOIs for research datasets. But at this point in time, most DOIs are Crossref’s.
What does finding DOIs in Reddit mean?
It means someone used a DOI to cite something! DOIs can be used for any kind of content, but because of the sheer volume of scientific publishing, lots of DOIs are for science. Having a DOI doesn’t say anything about quality or content. But it does indicate that the person who created the DOI probably intended it to be cited. We care because it means that every time a DOI is used a tiny bit of link-rot doesn’t have the opportunity to take hold. Every time something is discussed on Reddit and the DOI is used, it means that archaeologists using the data dump in 100 years will have identifiers to find the things being discussed, even if the web and URLs have long since crumbled to dust.
Or, more likely, in five year’s time when a few URLs will have shuffled around.
The results
DOIs have been used on Reddit since 2008 (the logs start in 2006). After a rocky start, we see hundreds being used per year.
That’s dozens per month.
The best subreddit to find DOIs is /r/Scholar, followed by /r/science. And then a lot of others with one or two per year.
Opportunities
It’s great to see DOIs being used in Reddit. But let’s be honest, it’s not a massive amount.
We have a list of domains that our DOIs point to. They mostly belong to publishers, so every time we see a link to a domain on the list, there’s a chance (not a certainty) that the link could have been made using a DOI. We found a large number of these, orders of magnitude more than DOIs. We’re still crunching the data.
The data
The data is quite large. It’s a 40 Gigabyte download compressed, which comes to about 170 GB that uncompressed. It contains the submissions to reddit between 2006 and 2015, not the comments, so each data point represents a thread of conversation about a DOI.
It includes all data for charts in this post, as well as the full list of DOIs, the full list of URLs that could possibly have DOIs, and the full JSON input line for each of these.
