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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 will be updating its DOI Display Guidelines within the next couple of weeks.  This is a big deal.  We last made a change in 2011 so it’s not something that happens often or that we take lightly.  In short, the changes are to drop “dx” from DOI links and to use “https:” rather than “http:”.  An example of the new best practice in displaying a Crossref DOI link is: https://doi.org/10.1629/22161

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.

TL;DR

Crossref discourages our members from using DOI-like strings or fake DOIs.

Details

Recently we have seen quite a bit of debate around the use of so-called “fake-DOIs.” We have also been quoted as saying that we discourage the use of “fake DOIs” or “DOI-like strings”. This post outlines some of the cases in which we’ve seen fake DOIs used and why we recommend against doing so.

We now have linked clinical trials deposits coming in from five publishers: BioMedCentral, BMJ, Elsevier, National Institute for Health Research and PLOS. It’s still a relatively small pool of metadata - around 4000 DOIs with associated clinical trial numbers - but we’re delighted to see that “threads” of publications are already starting to form.

If you look at this article in The Lancet and click on the Crossmark button you will see that in the Clinical Trials section there are links to three other articles reporting on the same trial: two from the American Heart Journal and one from BMJ’s Heart. Readers can navigate between these four articles in three separate journals using the Crossmark functionality- a new set of links and routes for discovery have appeared.

As part of our Event Data work we’ve been investigating where DOI resolutions come from. A resolution could be someone clicking a DOI hyperlink, or a search engine spider gathering data or a publisher’s system performing its duties. Our server logs tell us every time a DOI was resolved and, if it was by someone using a web browser, which website they were on when they clicked the DOI. This is called a referral.

I had a great chat with Danielle Padula of Scholastica, a journals platform with an integrated peer-review process that was founded in 2011.  We talked about how journals get started with Crossref, and she turned our conversation into a blog post that describes the steps to begin registering content and depositing metadata with us.  Since the result is a really useful description of our new member on-boarding process, I want to share it with you here as well.  As always, comments and questions are welcome here, at member@Crossref.org, and @CrossrefOrg.  - Anna_

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.

Back in 2014, Geoffrey Bilder blogged about the kick-off of an initiative between Crossref and Wikimedia to better integrate scholarly literature into the world’s largest knowledge space, Wikipedia. Since then, Crossref has been working to coordinate activities with Wikimedia: Joe Wass has worked with them to create a live stream of content being cited in Wikipedia; and we’re including Wikipedia in Event Data, a new service to launch later this year. In that time, we’ve also seen Wikipedia importance grow in terms of the volume of DOI referrals.

What happens to a research work outside of the formal literature? That’s what Event Data will aim to answer when the service launches later this year.

Following the successful DOI Event Tracker pilot in Spring 2014, development has been underway to build our new service, newly re-named Crossref Event Data. It’s an open data service that registers online activity (specifically, events) associated with Crossref metadata. Event Data will collect and store a record of any activity surrounding a research work from a defined set of web sources. The data will be made available as part of our metadata search service or via our Metadata API and normalised across a diverse set of sources. Data will be open, audit-able and replicable.