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We’ve been collecting citation events from Wikipedia for some time. We’re now pleased to announce a live stream of citations, as they happen, when they happen. Project this on your wall and watch live DOI citations as people edit Wikipedia, round the world.

View live stream »

In the hours since this feature launched, there are events from Indonesian, Portugese, Ukrainian, Serbian and English Wikipedias (in that order).

Background

On January 20th, 2015 the main DOI HTTP proxy at doi.org experienced a partial, rolling global outage. The system was never completely down, but for at least part of the subsequent 48 hours, up to 50% of DOI resolution traffic was effectively broken. This was true for almost all DOI registration agencies, including Crossref, DataCite and mEDRA.

At the time we kept people updated on what we knew via Twitter, mailing lists and our technical blog at CrossTech. We also promised that, once we’d done a thorough investigation, we’d report back. Well, we haven’t finished investigating all implications of the outage. There are both substantial technical and governance issues to investigate. But last week we provided a preliminary report to the Crossref board on the basic technical issues, and we thought we’d share that publicly now.

TL;DR

Watch a real-time stream of DOIs being cited (and “un-cited!” ) in Wikipedia articles across the world: https://live.eventdata.crossref.org/live.html

Background

For years we’ve known that the Wikipedia was a major referrer of Crossref DOIs and about a year ago we confirmed that, in fact, the Wikipedia is the 8th largest refer of Crossref DOIs. We know that people follow the DOIs, too. This despite a fraction of Wikipedia citations to the scholarly literature even using DOIs. So back in August we decided to create a Wikimedia Ambassador programme. The goal of the programme was to promote the use of persistent identifiers in citation and attribution in Wikipedia articles. We would do this through outreach and through the development of better citation-related tools.

TL;DR

Crossref’s “DOI Event Tracker Pilot”- 11 million+ DOIs & 64 million+ events. You can play with it at: http://goo.gl/OxImJa

Tracking DOI Events

So have you been wondering what we’ve been doing since we posted about the experiments we were conducting using PLOS’s open source ALM code? A lot, it turns out. About a week after our post, we were contacted by a group of our members from OASPA who expressed an interest in working with the system. Apparently they were all about to conduct similar experiments using the ALM code, and they thought that it might be more efficient and interesting if they did so together using our installation. Yippee. Publishers working together. That’s what we’re all about.

Hell’s teeth.

So today (January 20th, 2015) the DOI HTTP resolver at dx.doi.org started to fail intermittently around the world. The doi.org domain is managed by CNRI on behalf of the International DOI Foundation. This means that the problem affected all DOI registration agencies including Crossref, DataCite, mEDRA etc. This also means that more popularly known end-user services like FigShare and Zenodo were affected. The problem has been fixed, but the fix will take some time to propagate throughout the DNS system. You can monitor the progress here:

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/doi.org

Now for the embarrassing stuff…

tl;dr http://chronograph.labs.crossref.org

At Crossref we mint DOIs for publications and send them out into the world, but we like to hear how they’re getting on out there. Obviously, DOIs are used heavily within the formal scholarly literature and for citations, but they’re increasingly being used outside of formal publications in places we didn’t expect. With our DOI Event Tracking / ALM pilot project we’re collecting information about how DOIs are mentioned on the open web to try and build a picture about new methods of citation.

Do you want to see if a Crossref DOI (typically assigned to publications) refers to DataCite DOIs (typically assigned to data)? Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20150121025249/http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.4319/lo.1997.42.1.0001 Conversely, do you want to see if a DataCite DOI refers to Crossref DOIs? Voilà: https://web.archive.org/web/20150321190744/http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.1594/pangaea.185321 Background “How can we effectively integrate data into the scholarly record?” This is the question that has, for the past few years, generated an unprecedented amount of handwringing on the part researchers, librarians, funders and publishers.

Remember when I said that the Wikipedia was the 8th largest referrer of DOI links to published research? This despite only a fraction of eligible references in the free encyclopaedia using DOIs. We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia. This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references.

photo credit Summary You can use a new Crossref API to query all sorts of interesting things about who funded the research behind the content Crossref members publish. Background Back in May 2013 we launched Crossref’s FundRef service. It can be summarized like this: Crossref keeps and manages a canonical list of Funder Names (ephemeral) and associated identifiers (persistent). We encourage our members (or anybody, really- the list is available under A CC-Zero license waiver) to use this list for collecting information on who funded the research behind the content that our members publish.

[ Crossref Labs loves to be the last to jump on an internet trend, so what better than than to combine the Doge meme with altmetrics? Note: The API calls below have been superceeded with the development of the Event Data project. See the latest API documentation for equivalent functionality Want to know how many times a Crossref DOI is cited by the Wikipedia? http://det.labs.crossref.org/works/doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0086859 Or how many times one has been mentioned in Europe PubMed Central?