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TL;DR

Crossref and DataCite are forming a working group to explore conference identifiers and project identifiers. If you are interested in joining this working group and in doing some actual work for it, please contact us at community@crossref.org and include the text conference identifiers WG in the subject heading.

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 and Datacite provide a service to link publications and data. The easiest way for Crossref members to participate in this is to cite data using DataCite DOIs and to include them in the references within the metadata deposit. These data citations are automatically detected. Alternatively and/or additionally, Crossref members can deposit data citations (regardless of identifier) as a relation type in the metadata. Data & software citations from both methods are freely propagated.

The buzz is building around PIDapalooza - the first open festival of scholarly research persistent identifiers (PID), to be held at the Radisson Blu Saga Hotel Reykjavikon November 9-10, 2016. PIDapalooza will bring together creators and users of PIDs from around the world to shape the future PID landscape through the development of tools and services for the research community. PIDs support proper attribution and credit, promote collaboration and reuse, enable reproducibility of findings, foster faster and more efficient progress, and facilitate effective sharing, dissemination, and linking of scholarly works.

Test out the early preview of Event Data while we continue to develop it. Share your thoughts. And be warned: we may break a few eggs from time to time!

Want to discover which research works are being shared, liked and commented on? What about the number of times a scholarly item is referenced? Starting today, you can whet your appetite with an early preview of the forthcoming Crossref Event Data service. We invite you to start exploring the activity of DOIs as they permeate and interact with the world after publication.

Crossref goes live in tandem with DataCite to push both publication and dataset information to ORCID profiles automatically. All organisations that deposit ORCID iDs with Crossref and/or DataCite will see this information going further, automatically updating author records. 

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.

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…

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.

The South Park movie , “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” has a DOI: a) http://dx.doi.org/10.5240/B1FA-0EEC-C316-3316-3A73-L So does the pornographic movie, “Young Sex Crazed Nurses”: b) http://dx.doi.org/10.5240/4CF3-57AB-2481-651D-D53D-Q And the following DOI points to a fake article on a “Google-Based Alien Detector”: c) http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.93964 And the following DOI refers to an infamous fake article on literary theory: d) http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/466856 This scholarly article discusses the entirely fictitious Australian “Drop Bear”: e) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2012.731307 The following two DOIs point to the same article- the first DOI points to the final author version, and the second DOI points to the final published version: