Crossref’s funding data initiative (FundRef) encourages publishers to deposit information about the funding sources of authors’ research as acknowledged in their papers. The funding data comprises funder name and identifier, and grant number or numbers. Funding data can be deposited on its own or with the rest of the metadata for an item of content.

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.

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.

PDF-EXTRACT

Crossref Labs is happy to announce the first public release of “pdf-extract” an open source set of tools and libraries for extracting citation references (and, eventually, other semantic metadata) from PDFs. We first demonstrated this tool to Crossref members at our annual meeting last year. See the pdf-extract labs page for a detailed introduction to this new set of tools.

If you are unable to download and install the tool, you can play with a experimental web interface called “Extracto.” Be warned, Extracto is running on very feeble server using an erratic and slow internet connection. The only guarantee that we can make about using it is that it will repeatedly fall over and annoy you. The weasel has spoken.

Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales. In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported.

So does anybody remember the posting DOIs and Linked Data: Some Concrete Proposals? Well, we went with option “D.” From now on, DOIs, expressed as HTTP URIs, can be used with content-negotiation. Let’s get straight to the point. If you have curl installed, you can start playing with content-negotiation and Crossref DOIs right away: curl -D - -L -H “Accept: application/rdf+xml” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784” curl -D - -L -H “Accept: text/turtle” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784”

In order to encourage publishers and other content producers to embed metadata into their PDFs, we have released an experimental tool called “pdfmark”, This open source tool allows you to add XMP metadata to a PDF. What’s really cool, is that if you give the tool a Crossref DOI, it will lookup the metadata in Crossref and then apply said metadata to the PDF. More detail can be found on the pdfmark page on the Crossref Labs site.

We’re pleased to announce that a Crossref working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds. Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one <dc:creator> element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.

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.

I was playing around recently and ran across this little metadata hack. At first, I thought somebody was doing something new. But no, nothing so forward apparently. (Heh! 🙂 I was attempting to grab the response headers from an HTTP request on an article page and was using by default the Perl LWP library. For some reason I was getting metadata elements being spewed out as response headers - at least from some of the sites I tested.