Publishing on Crossref

Collaboration with Knowledge Futures to build support for high-volume DOI registration

Travis Rich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Knowledge Futures blog.

For many years, PubPub has made it possible for communities to assign DOIs to a range of outputs and component Pubs. Knowledge Futures and Crossref are building together to test the limits of what’s possible for high-volume, high-granularity DOI management. That means fast prototypes, real building, and learning through the process.

What this looks like

We’re starting by building. The goal is to get working prototypes in front of real use cases as quickly as we can, and let the technical, UX, operational, and infrastructure questions get answered through that process. What does it take to register and manage DOIs at a level of volume and granularity that goes beyond what most existing tools support? We’ll find out by trying.

A broader orientation for KF

This is also an example of where Knowledge Futures is headed more generally. We’re taking what we’ve learned from building publishing infrastructure and applying it across different parts of the scholarly communication ecosystem. Not siloed within PubPub development, but open to building more broadly and collaborating across organizational lines.

We’ve spent close to a decade learning what it takes to build and maintain reliable infrastructure for knowledge communities. That experience doesn’t have to live inside one product. We think working this way puts us in a stronger position as stewards of the things we maintain, and it opens the door to more collaboration across the ecosystem.

Aligned direction with Crossref

As Crossref adoption has skyrocketed, enabling DOIs for a vast range of research objects and organizations, they are looking to support these objects at scale and further upstream than traditional outputs. Alongside its fee remodelling effort begun in 2023, Crossref is backing this work with a $258k investment, partnering with Knowledge Futures to explore new models for the future of open research infrastructure.

Get involved

We’d love to hear your thoughts about high-volume, high-granularity DOIs. What’s your use case? What would it unlock for your community? Want to be involved in the design process? This collaboration with Crossref is just one piece of where we’re headed. If you’re curious about what we’re up to, or have something you’d like to share with us, get in touch. We’d love to tell you what we’re working on and hear what excites you too.

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - MetaROR’s approach

Ludo Waltman — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil raised some questions about good practices for Crossref DOI registration, asking for input from the scholarly communication community. In this post, Ludo and André reflect on the input received and discuss the approach to DOI registration that the MetaROR publish-review-curate platform is going to take.

Practices for assigning DOIs and structuring the associated metadata are not merely technical details. They shape how scholarly outputs are discovered, cited, evaluated, indexed, and preserved over time. As new models of publishing emerge, especially those that decouple dissemination from evaluation, these infrastructural choices increasingly influence what counts as a scholarly object, as well as how credit and accountability mechanisms are organized.

As editors of MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), a platform launched in 2024 and operating under the publish-review-curate model, we are interested in good practices for Crossref DOI registration in the context of innovative new approaches to scientific publishing. In the earlier blog post, we invited members of the broader scholarly communication community to share their perspective on the following two questions:

For each article on the MetaROR platform, there is a corresponding article on a preprint server. Is it acceptable to have two Crossref DOIs, one registered by the preprint server and one registered by the MetaROR platform, for essentially the same article?
If Crossref DOIs are registered for articles on the MetaROR platform, should the articles be assigned the type ‘journal-article’ or the type ‘preprint’ in their Crossref metadata, or something else entirely?

We were pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in these two questions. We received about 15 responses from colleagues in the scholarly communication community. Some colleagues posted a reply at the bottom of our blog post. Others responded on social media (Bluesky, LinkedIn) or shared their perspective by email.

Below we reflect on the responses received and we outline the approach to Crossref DOI registration that MetaROR is going to take.

DOI registration for articles on the MetaROR platform

Colleagues offered mixed opinions on the question of whether articles on the MetaROR platform should have their own DOI, in addition to the DOI these articles have on the preprint server on which they were originally published. Some colleagues argued there is no good reason for registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform and suggested this may cause confusion. One colleague reasoned that “if we want peer review to be something more ongoing and evolve beyond a single point in time judgment”, our approach should be to “better map the connections between events” rather than registering a new DOI each time an article has been peer-reviewed.

However, other colleagues expressed support for registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform. One colleague pointed out that this “allows the user to reference the exact artefact they have consulted”. This colleague also reminded us that in the past “people were worried about having a different DOI for a preprint and another for a VoR (version of record)”, while nowadays this is a generally accepted practice. Another colleague emphasized the value of decentralization and suggested to “let a thousand DOIs bloom”. Authors of an article peer-reviewed by MetaROR argued in favor of “an overarching DOI for the full package (preprint, reviews, author response and link to updated preprint)”, which in their view would make MetaROR’s “process more coherent”.

Having considered the various arguments in favor of or against registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform, we feel the arguments in favor are more compelling. Our perspective is that an article on the MetaROR platform differs in a meaningful way from the corresponding article on a preprint server, since the article on the MetaROR platform has been enriched with an evaluation by peer reviewers and editors. MetaROR provides a carefully curated package that includes not only the article itself, but also review reports and an editorial assessment. In our view, this justifies registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform. We also see DOI registration for articles on the MetaROR platform as a way to promote appropriate recognition for authors of articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR, similar to the way authors get recognition for articles published in traditional peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, when an article has multiple versions, each with their own DOI, it is important to establish a link between the different DOIs, indicating that the DOIs are associated with the same work. This is important for articles published first on a preprint server and then on a platform such as MetaROR just like it is important for articles published first on a preprint server and then in a peer-reviewed journal. In practice, we establish these links by registering relationships between DOIs in the associated metadata. In this way, we ensure that indexing services, discovery systems, and research analytics tools are able to recognize that the DOIs refer to different manifestations of the same work rather than independent outputs.

Record type for articles on the MetaROR platform

Our second question is about the record type to be used when registering a Crossref DOI for an article on the MetaROR platform. Many colleagues who provided input on this question argued there is a need for a new Crossref record type for ‘reviewed preprints’.

We feel the idea of such a new record type is interesting and its pros and cons deserve further consideration. However, any solution that requires changes in Crossref’s metadata schema will take time to realize, while for MetaROR we need a solution in the short term. At the moment, the most obvious options for MetaROR therefore seem to be to use either the record type ‘journal-article’ or the record type ‘preprint’ (which is in fact a subtype of the record type ‘posted-content’).

The use of the record type ‘preprint’ seems somewhat problematic to us, because preprints are typically understood to be articles that have not yet been formally peer-reviewed. In a way, articles on the MetaROR platform are the opposite of this, since these articles have undergone formal peer review. An article on the MetaROR platform is part of a package that also includes review reports and an editorial assessment. Such a package provides readers with a more informed understanding of an article than what they get from reading only the article itself. For this reason, we do not consider the record type ‘preprint’ to be suitable for articles on the MetaROR platform.

Instead of the record type ‘preprint’, we have decided to use the record type ‘journal-article’ for articles on the MetaROR platform. The record type ‘journal-article’ is intended for articles published in journals. To be clear, MetaROR considers itself a ‘platform’, not a ‘journal’. However, the distinction between ‘platforms’ and ‘journals’ is not very well defined and the choice of terminology therefore involves a certain degree of arbitrariness. Moreover, articles on the MetaROR platform have been formally evaluated, and in that sense they resemble articles in traditional peer-reviewed journals. Although the nature of the evaluation is different (i.e., MetaROR provides a narrative assessment, while traditional journals provide a ‘stamp of approval’), we feel the resemblance justifies the use of the record type ‘journal-article’. We also hope that the use of this record type will help to ensure that articles evaluated by publish-review-curate (PRC) platforms are treated similarly to articles evaluated by traditional journals, advancing beyond more conservative ways of dealing with articles on PRC platforms.

There is a precedent for using the Crossref record type ‘journal-article’ for articles evaluated by PRC platforms. For over a decade, this approach has been used by platforms operated by F1000, such as F1000Research, Gates Open Research, Open Research Europe, and Wellcome Open Research. The approach we are taking at MetaROR is similar to the approach taken by these platforms. At the same time, our approach is different from the approach of eLife, another prominent PRC platform. eLife uses the record type ‘preprint’ for all versions of an article on its platform except for the version that the authors consider to be final and that they choose to designate as the ‘version of record’. This version has the record type ‘journal-article’.

Summary of MetaROR’s approach to Crossref DOI registration

Figure 1 summarizes MetaROR’s approach to Crossref DOI registration. The figure considers the situation in which an article went through two rounds of peer review by MetaROR. Both rounds of peer review involved two reviewers. After two rounds of peer review by MetaROR, the article was published in a journal. We emphasize that journal publication is optional in MetaROR’s PRC approach. It is included in Figure 1 for the sake of completeness.

Figure 1: MetaROR’s approach to Crossref DOI registration

Each element in Figure 1 represents an item that has its own Crossref DOI. The shape of an element indicates the Crossref record type of an item (‘preprint’, ‘journal-article’, ‘peer-review’). MetaROR is responsible for the blue elements in the figure. The gray elements are the responsibility of other actors, either a preprint server or a journal. Arrows represent relationships between items. These relationships are captured in the Crossref metadata of the various items.

Figure 1 shows how MetaROR treats articles, review reports, editorial assessments, and author responses as first-class research objects. Each object has its own DOI, while the objects are linked through structured metadata. Assigning DOIs to review reports, editorial assessments, and author responses is central to our commitment to transparency, recognition, and reuse of evaluative contributions.

We note that Figure 1 assumes each version of an article on a preprint server has its own DOI. This is indeed how DOI registration is handled by many preprint servers, such as the OSF servers (e.g., MetaArXiv, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv), ChemRxiv, Research Square, and Preprints.org. However, some preprint servers use a single DOI for all versions of an article. This is the case for bioRxiv and medRxiv and also for arXiv, which registers DOIs with DataCite rather than Crossref. In the future, we hope these preprint servers will also adopt versioned DOIs.

Outlook

Over the past 25 years, practices for registering DOIs and associated metadata have evolved along with broader developments in the scholarly communication landscape. Inevitably, DOI registration practices will always be lagging behind the most recent developments in scholarly communication. From this point of view, the lack of agreement on good practices for DOI registration in the context of PRC platforms is not surprising. This lack of agreement can in fact be seen as part of a larger discussion about the pros and cons of different infrastructural approaches for handling ‘preprint review metadata’, including for instance the COAR Notify approach and the DocMaps approach.

MetaROR’s approach to DOI registration demonstrates both the power and richness of Crossref’s metadata schema and its limitations. As discussed above, several colleagues who responded to our earlier blog post consider the lack of a record type for ‘reviewed preprints’ to be a significant limitation. With the growing interest in PRC models for scientific publishing, there appears to be a need to systematically evaluate possible improvements that can be made to Crossref’s metadata schema to offer better support for new approaches to scientific publishing.

We see this not only as a technical challenge but also as an issue of infrastructure governance. We therefore invite further dialogue between DOI registration agencies, other metadata infrastructures, preprint servers, PRC platforms, and indexing services to explore pathways for improving metadata standards, whether through new record types, extended relationship vocabularies, or shared best practices. We hope our experiences with MetaROR will contribute to the collective effort needed to ensure that emerging models of scholarly communication are represented accurately, transparently, and responsibly in the scholarly record.

Crossref note: This discussion chimes with related plans for extending our schemas: more granular vocabulary for items within journal articles, preprints, reviews, and others; clearer relationship types; and support for the forthcoming NISO JAV recommendations. Our Preprint Advisory Group will discuss the topic this year, and our Metadata Advisory Group has both ‘journal article type vocab’ and ‘relationships’ on its radar for 2026. We look forward to engaging further on this topic as we work towards more flexible schemas in support of the Research Nexus.

The sunset is on the horizon for Metadata Manager. What's next?

Lena Stoll — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.

How did we get here?

In 2021, we said that we would be retiring the deprecated Metadata Manager as soon as we can offer members a suitable replacement for registering their journal content. So this news has been a long time coming - Metadata Manager has been very challenging for us to support, and we have found it impossible to develop additional features. However, we did not want to take the final step of switching off the interface until we were able to offer a suitable replacement for members who rely on manual helper tools to register their journal content.

That replacement, our new record registration form, has now been used by many members for over a year to register their journal content. The feedback so far has been positive, and we have been able to add functionality to the tool at a pace that we are happy with.

In July 2025, we contacted those members who are still using Metadata Manager to let them know that the tool will no longer be available after December 2025. So if you are affected by this news, you were probably already aware of it. But we wanted to go into a little more detail on the sunsetting of Metadata Manager, why we are doing it, and what’s next for Crossref’s content registration helper tools.

What has happened since 2021?

We have been developing the record registration form ever since that announcement in 2021. It began its life as a helper tool for registering grant records, but we knew we wanted to expand it to cover journal articles and other record types as soon as we could.

To see whether the concept behind the grants form could be applied to journal content, we first built an initial prototype and tested it with a number of Crossref ambassadors and volunteers. We wanted to ensure that the tool was intuitive to use, and to understand what functionality it would need to support for it to be truly useful to our members. Following some iteration on the invaluable feedback we received from our testers, we finally released the tool to production in September 2024 and began encouraging members to use it for their real-life article deposits.

We have been continuously adding new functionality since then, from additional fields for registering richer metadata to a feature that allows members to edit their articles’ metadata without having to re-enter everything into the form.

Now, about two months from the target date for retiring Metadata Manager, the record registration form is used by members to register about 200 articles per day, while Metadata Manager still sees about double that volume of submissions. So we have some way left to go.

Why is now the right time to retire Metadata Manager?

2025 has been a year of addressing technical debt for Crossref. My colleague Sara wrote about this co-ordinated push towards modernising our system in her post about our cloud migration in the summer.

Having the long-awaited replacement for Metadata Manager in place will allow us to free up the resources that have been tied up for years by troubleshooting Metadata Manager, in terms of both technology and user support, so that we can focus on projects and initiatives that align with our longer-term strategy.

How will we avoid the new tool developing the same problems as Metadata Manager?

As stated above, Metadata Manager has caused us many issues and headaches in different ways - but we have also learned a lot from dealing with these problems. As Bryan Vickery wrote in 2020, Metadata Manager is “not flexible enough to easily add other record types, like books/book chapters, or to include any changes we may make to our input schema.” To address this, we built the record registration form in a schema-driven way, which makes it adaptable to any future schema changes. It also means that we can spin up prototypes of new forms for additional record types quite quickly.

So while Metadata Manager was custom-built in a way that could only ever work for journal content, the record registration form already supports two record types and will support more in future. This is key for our goal of building a complete research nexus, which extends far beyond journal content, and even beyond “content” as such (did someone say grants?).

What happens next?

Metadata Manager will no longer be available from January 2026.
Starting next year, if you attempt to access Metadata Manager at https://www.crossref.org/metadatamanager/, you will be redirected to a deprecation note on https://www.crossref.org/deprecated/ which will link out to the new tool.

What options do I have for registering my journal content going forward?

If your organisation still uses Metadata Manager to register metadata for your journal articles, now is a good time to begin familiarising yourself with the alternatives available to you from 2026 forward - these include, but are not limited to, the new record registration form.

If your journal has an ISSN

We recommend you begin using the record registration form as soon as possible. Simply go to https://manage.crossref.org/records and sign in with your Crossref account credentials to register a journal article. You can also see a list of all the journal article records you have previously registered using our manual helper tools at https://manage.crossref.org/records/edit and edit their metadata using the form.

To help you make the switch from Metadata Manager, we will be hosting an interactive webinar on 13 November about how to transition to the new tool. Register here or look out for the recording, which will be shared in our events archive.

If your journal does not have an ISSN

The record registration form currently only supports ISSNs as journal identifiers. Title-level and volume/issue-level DOIs, which are at the core of how Metadata Manager handles journal metadata, have been the cause for some of the problems we have had over the years with that particular tool. Also, Crossref DOIs have always been intended primarily as citation identifiers, and entire journals/volumes/issues are very rarely cited. For that reason, we built the Record Registration Form such that it doesn’t support registering or using journal-level DOIs.

With that being said, if you do not (yet) have an ISSN for your journal for whatever reason, you can use our web deposit form to register your articles with journal DOI. If you do obtain an ISSN for your title later on, you can then simply begin using the record registration form from that point onward.

How will the new tool continue to be developed?

We will continue to work with our members and community to develop additional functionalities for the journal article form. Currently we are working on allowing relationships metadata to be registered using the form.

Ultimately, the goal is for the record registration form to become the one-stop shop for members who manually register and update their metadata. To this end, we are working on expanding the tool to cover additional record types - we have recently developed a prototype for registering books and chapters, and we will be looking to test this in the coming months with volunteers who are currently registering their book metadata via other avenues such as the web deposit form.

If you would like to support these efforts, or you have begun using the new tool and would like to share your feedback, come join the discussion in our community forum.

References

Bowman, S. (2021). Next steps for Content Registration. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/30vzx-r5x16
Bowman, S. (2025). We’ve migrated to the cloud; we hope you didn’t notice (but maybe you did). Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/wd6rx-vpq73
Vale, P. (2022). Forming new relationships: Contributing to Open source. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/cvq2e-q8t24

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - Request for input

Ludo Waltman — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil discuss the recently launched MetaROR publish-review-curate platform and the questions it raises about good practices for Crossref DOI registration in this emerging landscape.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are unique identifiers commonly assigned to research outputs such as journal articles, preprints, peer review reports, and datasets. The DOI of a research output allows the output to be identified online in a persistent way, even when the underlying publishing infrastructure changes (e.g., a journal moving from one publisher to another).

There are several DOI registration agencies. Most of the larger scientific publishers work with Crossref, and so do many preprint servers, and therefore our focus in this post is on Crossref. Crossref also keeps track of metadata associated with research outputs, such as the title, authors, and publication date of an output, and it makes this metadata openly available via APIs for all kinds of services to ingest and reuse. Because indexing, discovery, and evaluation tools rely heavily on this metadata, content registration practices and metadata design choices can have major effects on the visibility and findability of research outputs and on analytics used to monitor and assess research outputs and their contributors.

For the most common types of research outputs, such as journal articles and preprints, a broad consensus has emerged over the past decades on good practices for DOI registration. Such consensus means that articles are assigned the record type ‘article’ in their Crossref metadata. Likewise, many preprint servers register DOIs for preprints at Crossref, with the record type ‘preprint’ in the metadata. (The arXiv preprint server is an exception; it registers DOIs for preprints with DataCite rather than Crossref.)

For innovative new publication platforms, however, good practices for DOI registration are less clear. The approaches to scientific publishing offered by these platforms often do not fit neatly into established ways of working. For instance, for some of these platforms, the traditional distinction between peer-reviewed articles published in scientific journals and non-peer-reviewed articles posted on preprint servers is no longer applicable. This raises fundamental questions about suitable DOI registration practices for new approaches to scientific publishing.

MetaROR

The MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) platform, launched in November 2024 by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) and the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS), offers an example of the challenge of developing appropriate DOI registration practices for new publishing models.

Inspired by similar initiatives such as eLife and others, MetaROR adopts the so-called publish-review-curate model. Authors first publish their article on a preprint server and then submit it to MetaROR. MetaROR then organizes an open peer review process for the article. Review reports are published on the MetaROR platform, along with a copy of the preprinted article and an editorial assessment. Rather than a simple binary decision (accept vs. reject), an editorial assessment is a short one-paragraph statement summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of an article. Each review report and each editorial assessment has its own DOI registered at Crossref. In this way, review reports are treated as first-class research outputs that can, for instance, be indexed in scientific literature databases and can be cited in other research outputs.

For an article submitted to MetaROR, the publication of the review reports, the editorial assessment, and a copy of the article itself concludes MetaROR’s publish-review-curate process. The authors of the article may revise their work in light of the feedback received, and MetaROR may review the revised article. However, there is no requirement that revisions must be made. The primary aim of the review reports and the editorial assessment published on the MetaROR platform is to offer context for readers of the article, helping readers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

Crossref DOI registration

Registration of DOIs for open peer review reports is increasingly common. By registering Crossref DOIs for review reports and editorial assessments, MetaROR enables reviewers and editors to be recognized for their contributions. But what about recognition for authors?

A crucial element in MetaROR’s philosophy is that authors of articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR deserve to be recognized in a similar way as authors of articles published in traditional peer-reviewed journals. One way to promote appropriate recognition for authors of articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR is to ensure that articles on the MetaROR platform, just like articles in peer-reviewed journals, have their own DOI. While this may seem straightforward to arrange, it actually raises two non-trivial questions about good practices for Crossref DOI registration:

For each article on the MetaROR platform, there is a corresponding article on a preprint server. Is it acceptable to have two Crossref DOIs, one registered by the preprint server and one registered by the MetaROR platform, for essentially the same article?
If Crossref DOIs are registered for articles on the MetaROR platform, should the articles be assigned the type ‘article’ or the type ‘preprint’ in their Crossref metadata, or something else entirely?

On the first question, it could be argued that having two Crossref DOIs for the same article is problematic and that MetaROR, therefore, should not register DOIs for articles on its platform. Alternatively, one could argue that an article on the MetaROR platform differs in a meaningful way from the corresponding article on a preprint server, since the article on the MetaROR platform has been enriched with peer review reports and an editorial assessment, similar to the way an article in a peer-reviewed journal may be seen as an enriched version of the corresponding article on a preprint server. This line of reasoning would justify registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform.

On the second question, the argument could be made that articles on the MetaROR platform should be assigned the type ‘preprint’ in their Crossref metadata, since the type ‘article’ is intended for articles in journals and MetaROR does not consider itself to be a journal (in fact, MetaROR works with partner journals to enable articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR to be published in journals) and does not certify articles in the way journals do (i.e., MetaROR does not make accept/reject decisions). On the other hand, one could argue that articles on the MetaROR platform should be assigned the type ‘article’, since the peer-reviewed nature of articles in journals is typically seen as the key factor distinguishing these articles from articles on preprint servers. Articles on the MetaROR platform have been peer-reviewed, and in that sense, they resemble articles in journals. A third line of reasoning could be that neither the ‘preprint’ nor the ‘article’ type is fully appropriate for articles on the MetaROR platform and, consequently, that there is a need for a new Crossref record type.

What is your take?

The MetaROR team, in consultation with Crossref, will need to decide how to deal with the two questions discussed in this blog post. After some preliminary conversations between the MetaROR team and Crossref, we decided to share these questions more widely to solicit input from the broader community. We invite you to share your thoughts on the two questions, either by posting a comment on this blog post or by reaching out to us on social media or by email. Community perspectives will help shape good practices not only for MetaROR but also for other publish-review-curate initiatives facing similar questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Ludo Waltman and André Brasil are members of the editorial team of MetaROR. Ludo and André are grateful to Ginny Hendricks at Crossref for valuable discussions about the issues raised in this blog post.

Metadata beyond discoverability

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Metadata is one of the most important tools needed to communicate with each other about science and scholarship. It tells the story of research that travels throughout systems and subjects and even to future generations. We have metadata for organising and describing content, metadata for provenance and ownership information, and metadata is increasingly used as signals of trust.

Following our panel discussion on the same subject at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in May 2024, in this post we explore the idea that metadata, once considered important mostly for discoverability, is now a vital element used for evidence and the integrity of the scholarly record. We share our experiences and views on the metadata significance and workflows from the perspective of academic and university presses – thus we primarily concentrate on the context of books and journal articles.

The communication of knowledge is facilitated by tiny elements of metadata flitting around between thousands of systems telling minuscule parts of the story about a research work. And it isn’t just titles and authors and abstracts – what we think of as metadata has really evolved as more nuance is needed in the assessment and absorption of information. Who paid for this research and how much, how exactly did everyone contribute, what data was produced and is it available for me to reuse it, as well as, increasingly, things like post-publication comments, assertions from “readers like me”, who has reproduced this research or refuted these conclusions.

Different types of published works are described by different types of metadata – journal articles, book chapters, preprints, dissertations. And those metadata elements can be of varying importance for different users. In this article, we will talk about metadata from the perspectives of four personas highlighted by the Metadata 20/20:

Metadata Creators, who provide descriptive information (metadata) about research and scholarly outputs.
Metadata Curators, who classify, normalise and standardise this descriptive information to increase its value as a resource.
Metadata Custodians, who store and maintain this descriptive information and make it available for consumers.
Metadata Consumers, who knowingly or unknowingly use the descriptive information to find, discover, connect, and cite research and scholarly outputs.

Our approach delineates the metadata lifecycle, from authorship, through production, discovery and through continuous curation. Though some of the metadata is generated outside of that linear process, and much happens before the authorship step, we see it as a clear and useful breakdown of how metadata contributes to a new piece of content.

Authorship

The first stage in the metadata lifecycle, authorship, is just the beginning of a dynamic process with many collaborators. A formative piece of the puzzle, authorship involves the authors or contributors, the editorial team and/or the marketing team and this is when the shape of the project and its metadata takes form. During this stage, the book or journal’s metadata exists only between the originators and the publisher, allowing the most opportunity for creativity and enhancement. Once the metadata reaches the next checkpoint along the lifecycle and is sent out externally, it’s more difficult and riskier to make major changes to the key metadata elements. In scholarly monograph publishing especially, we have the advantage of longer production lead times during which to amend and manipulate metadata during this stage.

At this stage, authors may have ideas of titles, subtitles and descriptions and it is up to the editors and other team members at the publisher to think strategically about how this can be optimised. The marketing and sales teams may be thinking about how the abstracts, keywords, and classifications can be best optimised for the web, leading to increased sales. Discoverability and interoperability of metadata for a book or journal, especially the use of persistent identifiers, is beneficial both for the author – in that their book is easily discovered, used, and cited – and for the publisher – increased visibility, sales, and usage.

Current challenges at the authorship stage include changing goalposts for metadata standards and accessibility requirements, which also have knock-on effects in subsequent stages in the metadata lifecycle. One of the key challenges with these is that they require buy-in from multiple players to keep up with and amend, and publishers must think closely about how these changes may affect metadata workflows for books at different stages of publication.

Production

As a book or journal article comes into production, it’s time to update and release the metadata to retailers, libraries, data aggregators and distributors. The metadata should be updated and checked to make sure that it’s still a good reflection of the product or the content that it describes and complete enough to release, including a final cover image in the case of books. This is still very much a collaborative effort with multiple roles involved. Technical details, such as spine width, page extents, and weight, are added, capturing the final specification. The editorial team may update metadata entered into systems earlier in the process. For example reviewing the prices, updating subject classification codes or amending the chapter order. If any of the content is to be published open access, appropriate licensing and access metadata need to be included, so that users of the content are clear about what they can (and can’t!) do with it. Metadata that’s not yet captured upstream can be added or enhanced. For example, vendors already involved in the production process can verify that persistent identifiers (PIDs) are present and correct in funding metadata.

More and more metadata elements are being requested by supply chain partners. For example, new requirements being introduced to provide commodity codes, spine width, carton quantities, gratis copy value and country of manufacture. There may be differences in metadata depending on the methods of production. For example, country of manufacture will be supplied differently when using traditional print methods where the whole print run is carried out at a location, or where a title is manufactured print on demand and the location of printing is determined by the delivery address.

In an XML-first workflow, metadata can be captured with the content files to aid with discovery. This usually requires multiple systems, both internal and external. These systems need to be able to work together to ensure that only up-to-date metadata is used. Metadata will change throughout the production process, whether it’s the publication of an accepted manuscript through to the final version of record, or pre-order information to the published version, so updates need to feed out regularly.

The right metadata needs to go to the right recipient. Some is not useful or cannot be processed by certain recipients. For example, a printer, retailer, librarian or data aggregator each have their own needs and use cases and may receive and process metadata in different formats or require different fields.

Discovery

Discovery is the series of actions taken by an end user to retrieve and access relevant content they do not know about. Discovery can happen everywhere: Google (a search engine), a library catalog, a publisher platform, etc. However, Discovery is associated with using Discovery systems in the academic sector.

The technological landscape of libraries has developed in the last 15 years. Discovery systems are tools libraries subscribe to in order to allow their end users to have one search experience within their library holdings. It is paramount for librarians that library collections are used; hence, it is very important for them that the discovery system of their choice contains all the relevant metadata. Libraries expect their discovery service to include their content coverage as comprehensively as possible. Content items not represented or misrepresented in a discovery system create challenges to libraries in how they might otherwise ensure that these materials are discovered and accessed.

Libraries’ adoption and usage of discovery systems are surrounded by the belief that the great benefits of this technology are the one search box and the configuration flexibility, which are the most important benefits. Libraries invest a significant amount of money in discovery services. The increase in usage is the success indicator of this adoption and a positive return on investment.

The backbone of discovery systems is formed by three crucial elements: a user interface, a metadata index, and a link resolver or Knowledge Base. These elements, along with a back-end control panel for librarian configuration, are the key components that enable the discovery process.

The discovery index, a database storing descriptive data from various content providers, data sets, and content types, is a testament to the collaborative efforts of content providers and discovery systems vendors. Their work under the Discovery Metadata Sharing partnership agreements, which establish the format, scope, frequency, and support of the collaboration, is instrumental in meeting librarians’ expectations.

Format

The discovery metadata integration processes have settled down for most cases in these two metadata delivery workflows.

Metadata for the index of discovery: Discovery systems have traditionally made efforts to work with various metadata formats like MARC, proprietary templates, etc., but the preferred format is XML. This metadata could include all the bibliographic information data, including index terms and full text at the article and chapter level.

Metadata for link resolvers and Knowledge bases: Knowledge bases are tools that contain information about what is included in a product, packages, and/or databases. KBART is the preferred format in this area. It includes a set of basic bibliographic descriptions at the publication level and linking information for direct and OpenURL syntaxes.

Frequency

The delivery channels vary, and the frequency could vary daily to yearly, depending on the publication schedule.

Scope

Library collections include various content types, including archival materials, open access, and multimedia alongside the more traditional books and periodicals. Different content types will require different metadata elements to make a comprehensive discovery-friendly description, and the metadata elements will impact the formats in use.

Discovery services will receive this data and prioritise uploading. They will select and manipulate the required metadata elements according to their system requirements. These metadata tweaks and selections are not always communicated to the content providers and/or libraries. Ultimately, librarians decide which metadata will be visible on their discovery tool and the linking methods of their choice.

As described, Discovery is a complex area where the activities of its main stakeholders are interconnected. The success of the end users’ discovery journey from search to access depends on the successful integration, implementation, and maintenance of the discovery systems. This necessitates a combined effort from the three discovery stakeholders: content providers, discovery system providers, and libraries. Their collaborative work is not just crucial, but integral to supporting discovery and fulfilment in the most efficient manner possible. Your active involvement in this process is what makes it successful.

How do we ensure discoverability?

Electronic resources do not exist in isolation but are assessed and used depending on their level of integration in the discovery landscape where libraries and patrons are active. From a content provider’s perspective, discoverability is about the number and efficiency of entry points to our products created in third-party discovery products.

The level of discovery integration has a direct impact on sales and upsell opportunities. Products that are not discoverable are difficult to work with, and the opposite is true for products that are considered discoverable. Your role in ensuring discoverability directly influences the user experience and sales, making your work crucial and impactful. The term ‘Discoverability’ is critical in discovery library systems. It refers to the extent to which eResources are searchable in a discovery system, and it directly influences the ease with which users can find the information they need, thereby enhancing their overall experience. In practical terms, the degree of discoverability will be impacted by the quality of the metadata supplied, the transformations the metadata suffers in the integration process to discovery systems, and the configuration’s maintenance.

The general principles of metadata quality also apply in this area: accuracy, completeness, and timely delivery. Your attention to these principles is crucial to contributing to the effectiveness of the discovery process. Metadata enrichment practices like identifiers and standards are also applicable. Your meticulous attention to detail in maintaining metadata quality ensures the effectiveness of the discovery process.

Discovery as a mindset in the publishing process will increase discoverability, as it will be influenced by product designs (whether the content is linkable) and which metadata outputs are possible. For example, author-generated index terms will be more effective for meeting research search terms, and detailed article titles will probably be more discoverable than general titles. Finally, all the integration, descriptive metadata, configurations, etc., leave much room for errors. The flow is complex; on occasion, the products and content are more complicated to describe than tools can handle, and there are millions of holdings per library to manage. Constant maintenance and troubleshooting are crucial elements to maintaining and increasing discoverability.

Metadata beyond publication

In the lead-up to publication, finalising rich complete metadata can seem like establishing a fixed set of information. Post-publication, however, the metadata workflow should be dynamic, able to evolve to keep pace with new demands and opportunities. Think of metadata as a journey rather than a one-time destination, and look at ways to futureproof your metadata by actively adapting to some of the following types of change.

Changing Publisher Goals and Product Needs

Metadata should align with changing priorities for a publisher. Developing new formats, shifts in commissioning focus or building new distribution partnerships may require metadata updates. For instance, re-releasing content in audiobook form or digitising a backlist title warrants a metadata review to ensure current and prospective readers find accurate, relevant information.

Changing Technology and Metadata Standards

Advances in technology, from artificial intelligence to emerging metadata standards, offer enhanced possibilities for capturing and updating metadata. AI, for example, can help enrich metadata with more precise subject tagging, while new metadata formats may offer greater compatibility across platforms and discovery services. Staying current with these tools can help publishers manage metadata more efficiently and enhance discoverability.

Changing Societal Values

As society evolves, so do expectations for inclusive and socially responsible metadata. Utilising new categorisation codes, such as those for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, can align metadata with emerging social goals. Similarly, publishers may need to revisit keywords and category codes to reflect language changes, balancing the integrity of historic records with the need for current, appropriate terminology.

Changing Industry Priorities

Commitments to accessibility and sustainability have prompted developments in metadata. Increasingly, publishers need to be able to use metadata to build a record of sustainable production methods, such as paper sources, printing methods or ink types. New metadata fields for accessibility specifications will also support more inclusive reader experiences going forward. Metadata will play an increasingly vital role in meeting industry standards for accessibility, EUDR and EAA compliance, and environmental transparency.

Changing Customer and Librarian Expectations

Finally, as the metadata expectations of customers grow and the nature of roles and responsibilities in library and collection management professions develops, teamwork and making good use of available resources are essential. Publishers don’t have to tackle this alone. Working with organisations such as Crossref or Book Industry Communication (BIC), signing up to newsletters and webinars, and forming an in-house discovery group are all great ideas for sharing ideas and best practice, and ensuring your metadata workflow is adaptable and responsive. Be part of the conversation now rather than struggling to keep up down the line!

What are some challenges and opportunities with metadata?

JM: Metadata that establishes permanence is a real opportunity in a digital landscape where content can move or be taken down, links can rot, website certificates can expire. Persistent identifiers like ORCiDs for people and DOIs for content are key examples of metadata that establish enduring routes to, and provenance of, published digital content.

KM: Metadata creation, maintenance and change has long been seen as a manual process. AI tools offer a real opportunity for metadata creation and review, especially for keywords and classification codes, at a scale and speed that has the potential to transform metadata workflows. Especially for backlist transformation, AI could offer real opportunities in this area. A challenge we face for monograph metadata more specifically is that much of the scholarly metadata infrastructure is built around the journal article, and it can be difficult to fit longer form content into these systems of discovery.

MT: Metadata is crucial. Good metadata (complete, accurate, and timely) is the base for smooth integrations and easy discovery interactions with eResources. Bad metadata (inaccurate, incomplete, late) will be the main reason for undiscovered content. At this point, the eResources industry is still based on different versions of the same metadata, which is the leading cause of problems. It is probably time to start considering a unique record approach. This unique record, which will be complete and accurate, could be used by different systems for different purposes. I know there are many details to define here, but if you think about it, it is not impossible and could solve the many known issues.

How do you ensure the quality and completeness of your metadata? Do you have ways of auditing it?

SP: Validation of data is really important, so choosing or building a system that’s set up to do this is an important foundation. It’s straightforward to check for completeness of fields and I run daily checks on our book metadata to make sure there’s nothing missing in the files feeding out. Quality can be more challenging to monitor. Feedback from data recipients is key, and accreditation schemes such as the BIC Metadata Excellence Award are a great way to benchmark progress. Good training and clear documentation help to make sure that everyone involved in creating and updating metadata understands exactly what they need to do and the standards they need to meet.

KM: Earlier this year we completed a year-long data cleansing project as part of our move to a new title management database. This gave us the time to address gaps in backlist metadata as well as to identify any inconsistencies across records for the same book, and enrich key metadata fields like classification codes, keywords and PIDs. For frontlist titles, each person owns a number of fields to ensure they are complete before a book’s metadata is distributed – some of these have validation tools which will prevent a book’s metadata from being sent out unless it is complete.

MT: Strict and consistent internal processes are essential to ensure quality and completeness. Following the different standards and industry recommendations helps to keep the quality at high standards. Random manual checks and system-based checks help to ensure everything is good. We carry out projects where we work with specific aspects of the metadata. This building-blocks approach ensures the different data layers are as good as possible. As with any project, metadata projects should have specific goals, outcomes, resources, and documentation.

How do you know if (and how much) metadata helps achieve your goals?

JM: Take any available opportunities to find out what people think of your metadata – via library conferences, institutional customer feedback, and by working with the library team at our home institution, we’ve had some really useful and interesting conversations about MUP’s metadata and where we can improve it to make it as relevant as possible for different stakeholder needs.

MT: Customers and Discovery partners will inform us if something is incorrect. Usage data is also a good indicator of how healthy our metadata is. Following industry standards is another good reference point for assessing the metadata. Finally, the metadata is only good when we know what we want to use it for. So, always considering what we are trying to achieve helps us understand how effective the metadata is.

KM: As the others have noted here, and we represent a range of different types and sizes of publishers, measuring the direct impact of metadata is an ongoing challenge. We think about the different end users who might encounter our metadata further down the supply chain – retail customers searching on Amazon, librarians filtering results on purchasing platforms, researchers finding our books and journals through citations on popular online search engines – and consider what elements of our metadata might help reach those people in the right ways.

JM: Ideally, you’ll see an uplift in sales or usage for every metadata element that you add, review or expand, although it can be challenging to quantify and prove a direct correlation between richer metadata and higher revenue or discoverability, as there are will be other factors involved. For my Operations team, what is certain is that richer, more comprehensive metadata means fewer errors are thrown up by the distribution systems and feeds we use, which means colleagues save time and gain productivity by not having to resolve and rerun failed jobs, chase missing information from other teams, or manually send information to third parties. My job is also made easier because things like size and weight of every printed product are recorded in our bibliographic database as standard, easy to report on and analyse, which helps with forecasting costs for inventory storage or shipping. Metadata can be powerful.

Scholarly metadata as trust signals: Opportunities for journal editors

Madhura Amdekar — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Scholarly metadata as trust signals: opportunities for journal editors

Published in Science Editor (Vol. 47, No. 4, December 2024), this article reframes scholarly metadata as a practical trust signal in the fight to protect research integrity — and sets out specific, actionable opportunities for journal editors to use Crossref metadata to detect, deter, and respond to integrity threats.

Strategists

Understand why metadata is integrity infrastructure. The presence and richness of metadata — not the DOI itself — is what carries trust signals across the scholarly record.

Decision-makers

Know which metadata to require and check. A practical framework for journal editors making policy decisions on contributor identifiers, affiliations, funding, peer review, and update notices.

Practitioners

See where to act in editorial workflows. Concrete opportunities to use Crossref metadata, Crossmark, and Cited-by to detect paper mills, citation cartels, and other integrity threats.

What this article covers

The integrity landscape — paper mills, citation cartels, fabricated peer reviews, fake papers, and AI-generated images as emerging threats to the scholarly record
Metadata as trust signal — why the DOI alone does not signal quality, and how the presence (or absence) of associated metadata acts as evidence of trustworthiness
Crossref’s role — how open, machine-readable metadata across member deposits enables downstream services and editors to assess research outputs at scale
ROR IDs — how organisation identifiers help connect problematic manuscripts to their institutional context
Crossmark — how update notices, retractions, and corrections strengthen the integrity of the scholarly record after publication
Cited-by — how citation context can surface citation patterns worth attention
A call to journal editors — concrete opportunities to enrich the metadata you deposit and to draw on the metadata others have deposited

Read the article

Read on Science Editor

Shooting for the stars – ASM’s journey towards complete metadata

Kornelia Korzec — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.

In 2022, we have observed with delight the growth of one of our members from basic coverage of their publications to over 90% in most areas, and no less than 70% of the corpus is covered by all key types of metadata Crossref enables (see their own participation report for details). Here, Deborah Plavin and David Haber share the story of ASM’s success and lessons learnt along the way.

Could you introduce your organisation?

The American Society for Microbiology publishes 16 peer-reviewed journals advancing the microbial sciences, from food microbiology, to genomics and the microbiome, comprising 14% of all microbiology articles. Six of those are open-access journals, and 56% of ASM’s published papers are open access. Together, our journals contribute 25% of all microbiology citations.

Would you tell us a little more about yourselves?

DH: David Haber, Publishing Operations Director at the American Society for Microbiology. I live in a century-old house that is in a perpetual state of renovation due to my inability to stop starting new projects before I complete old ones.

DP: Deborah Plavin, Digital Publishing Manager at the American Society for Microbiology. Following David’s example, my apartment in Washington D.C. is just up the block from one of the homes Duke Ellington lived in https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142334.

What value do society publishers in general see in metadata in your view?

DP: In my view, robust metadata allows publishers to look at changes over time, do comparative analysis within and across research areas, more easily identify trends, and plan for future analysis (e.g., if we deposit data citation information and we change our processes to make it more straightforward, do we see any change in the percentage of articles that include that information, etc.).

DH: To echo Deborah’s point, to be able to name something distinctly and clearly identify its specific attributes is vital to understanding past research and planning for future possibilities. One of our fundamental roles as a publisher for a non-profit society is to properly lay this metadata foundation so that we can provide services and new venues for our members, authors, and readers that match their needs and track with the trends in research. Without good and robust metadata, it is impossible to truly understand the direction in which our community is pointing us.

Metadata for your own research outputs in the last year has grown rapidly. Why such focus on metadata in 2022?

DP: This is something that ASM has been chipping away at over time. Years ago we found that it wasn’t always easy to take advantage of deposits that included new kinds of metadata. That was either because we needed to work out how and where to capture it in the process or because platform providers weren’t always ready — coming up with ways to process the XML that publishers supply in many different ways takes time. These back-end processes that feed the infrastructure aren’t usually of great interest to stakeholders, and so it allowed us to play around, flounder, fail, refine, and try again.

We looked at having 3rd parties deposit metadata for us, and while that helped expand the kind of metadata we were delivering, it created workflow challenges of its own. What turned out to be most effective was budgeting for content cleanup projects and depositing updated and more robust metadata to Crossref.

We also benefited from a platform migration, which allowed us to take advantage of additional resources during that process.

DH: Coming from a production background, I have always been fascinated with the when and how of capturing key metadata during the publishing process. When are those data good and valuable, and when should they be tossed or cleaned up for downstream deliveries? Because Deborah and ASM directors saw a more complete Crossref metadata set for our corpus as a truly valuable target, we were able to really think hard about what kind of data we were capturing and when, how those requirements may have influenced our various policies and copyediting requirements over the years, and how best to re-engineer our processes with the goal of good metadata capture throughout our publishing workflows. From our perspective, Crossref gave us a target, a “this-is-cool-bit-of-info" that Crossref can collect in a deposit; therefore, how can we capture that during our processes while driving further efficiencies? ASM journals had been so driven by legacy print workflows that such a change in perspective (toward metadata as a publishing object) really allowed us to re-imagine almost everything we do as a publisher.

Has the OSTP memo influenced your effort?

DP: I think that the Nelson memo hasn’t changed our focus; instead, I think it’s been another data point supporting our efforts and work in this area.

DH: Deborah is exactly right. The release of this memo only re-affirmed our commitment to creating complete and rich metadata. The Nelson memo points to many possible paths forward, in terms of both Open Access and Open Science, but we feel our work on improving our metadata outputs positions us well to pick a path that best suits our goals as a non-profit society publisher.

How big was this effort? Could you draw us a picture of how many colleagues or parts of the organisation were involved? Did you involve any external stakeholders, such as authors, editors, or others?

DH: It was simple. Took five minutes… In all seriousness, the key is having the support of the organisation as a whole. To do this properly, it is vitally important to know the end from the beginning, so to speak. It is one thing to say let’s start capturing ORCID IDs and deliver them to Crossref, but it is completely another to create a cohesive process in which those IDs are authenticated and validated throughout the workflow. So something as simple as a statement “ORCID IDs seem cool, let’s try to capture them” could affect how researchers submit files, how reviewers log into various systems (i.e., ORCID as SSO), how data are passed to production vendors, what copyeditors and XML QC people need to be focused on, and what integrations authors may expect at the time of publication. Being part of an organisation that embraced such change allowed us to proceed with care with each improvement to the metadata we made.

But that is more about incremental improvement. The beginning of this process started when we were making upgrades to our online publishing platform, and we were trying to figure out how best to get DOIs registered for our older content. When we started looking at this, we soon realized that, sure, we could do the bare minimum and just assign DOIs to this older content outside the source XML/SGML, but did that make sense? Wouldn’t it make more sense, especially since we were updating the corpus to a new DTD, to populate the source content with these newly assigned DOIs? Once we decided that we were going to revise the older content with DOIs, it made sense for us to create a custom XSL transform routine to generate Crossref deposits that would capture as much metadata as possible. So, working with a vendor to clean and update our content for one project (an online platform update) allowed us also to make massive improvements to our Crossref metadata as a side benefit.

Of course, I do have to apologize to the STM community for the Crossref outages in late 2019. That was just me depositing thousands of records in batches one sleepless night.

What were the key challenges you encountered in this project, and how did you overcome them?

DH: Resources and time are always an issue. Much of the work was done in-house in spare moments captured here and there. But there are great resources in github and at Crossref to help focus on defining what is important and what is possible in such a project. And, honestly, defining what was important and weighing that against the effort to find said important bit in the corpus of articles we have was the most challenging part of this process. In other words, limiting the focus. Once one decides to start looking at the inconsistencies in older content, it is hard not to say: “Oh, look. That semi-important footnote was treated as a generic author note rather than a conflict-of-interest statement; let’s fix that.” Once you start down that path, you can spend years fiddling with stuff. For me, a key mantra was: “We now have access to the content. We can always do another Crossref metadata update if things change or shift over time.”

Have there been any important milestones along the way you were able to celebrate? Or any set-backs you had to resolve in the process?

DP: For as long as I can remember, the importance of good metadata has been among the loudest messages of best practice in the industry. I don’t think that I have been able to really quantify/ demonstrate the value of that work. Looking at the consistent increases in the Crossref monthly resolution reports that we saw between 2015 and 2022 and looking at our participation reports has helped provide some measure of progress. For example, the number of average monthly successful resolutions in that Crossref report in 2015 was ~390,000. The last time I checked, the 2022 numbers were ~ 3.7 million. In 2023, I hope that we will be able to leverage Event Data for this as well.

The setbacks have fallen into two categories: timing and process. Our internal resourcing to get this done within our preferred time frame, to have the content loaded and delivered, and triage problems—it’s a battle between the calendar and competing priorities.

DH: When Deborah first shared those stats with me, I was floored. I don’t think either of us suspected such an increase was possible. For me, the biggest setback was mistakenly sending about ~50,000 DOI records to queue and watching them all fail because I grabbed the wrong batch. Ooops. I never made that mistake again, though.

Was any specific type of metadata or any part of the schema particularly easy or particularly difficult to get right in ASM’s production process?

DH: For us, the most difficult piece of metadata revolves around data availability and how we capture linked data resources (outside of data citation resources). Because of our current editorial style (which had been print-centric for years), we did not do a good job of identifying whether there are data associated with published content in a consistent machine-readable way. We did some experiments with one of our journals to capture this outside of our normal Crossref deposit routine, but that was not as accurate or sustainable as we would have liked. But, in that experiment, we learned a few things about how we treat these data throughout our publishing process and we have plans to create a sustainable integrated workflow for this to capture resource/data linkages in our Crossref deposits.

What were your thoughts on last year’s move to open references metadata? Has that impacted on your project in any way?

DP: We were really excited about this; based on the rather limited approach to sorting out impact at the moment, the more metadata we push out into the ecosystem, the more it appears to be used. In my view, that is at the core of what society publishers want to do—ensure that research is accessible and discoverable wherever our users expect to find it.

DH: 100% agree.

How did you keep motivated and on-course throughout?

DP: These kinds of things are never done; for example, we have placeholders for CRediT roles, and getting ready for that work as part of a DTD migration will be the next big thing. The motivation for that is really meeting our commitment to the community, seeing the impact of the author metadata versus article metadata, and seeing what we can learn.

DH: Metadata at its core is one of the pillars of our service as a publisher. To provide the best service, we need to provide the best metadata possible. Just remembering that this can be incremental, allows us to celebrate the large moments and the small. And whether one is partying with a massive 7 layer cake or a smaller cake pop, both are sweet and motivating.

Now that the project is completed, are you seeing the benefits you were hoping to achieve?

DP: This is a hard one to answer as we are using limited measurements at this time. At a high level, I am pleased. While I am eager to leverage event data in the coming year, it would be really helpful to get feedback from the community on how we can improve as well as other ways to evaluate impact.

DH: I want to take up this idea of metadata as a service once more. I don’t mean in terms of discoverability or searchability, either. Let’s take ORCID deposited into Crossref as an example. When done properly (with the proper authentication and validation occurring in the background), we are able to integrate citation data directly to an author’s ORCID profile. We have found that this small service is really appreciated.

Is there any metadata that you’d like to be able to include with your publishing records in the future that isn’t possible currently? What would it be and why?

DP: CRediT roles would be great because it could give greater insight into collaboration within and across disciplines, it could allow for some automation and integration opportunities in the peer review process, and maybe it would visualize aspects of authors’ careers.

DH: I second capturing CRediT roles. What would be really interesting is also creating a standard that quantifies the accessibility conformance/rating of content and passing that into Crossref.

What was the key lesson you learned from this project?

DP: Incremental change can be just as challenging as a massive overhaul, and so it’s important to reevaluate your goals along the way—things always change. There have been cases where we were able to do things that we hadn’t initially thought were feasible.

DH: Always keep the larger goal in mind and remember that any project can birth a new project. Everything does not happen at once.

What’s your next big challenge for 2023?

DP: There is a lot to contend with in the industry right now, and in addition to that we are going through some serious infrastructure changes in our program. With all that madness comes many opportunities. For that reason, when I take a step back from the tactical implications of all that and what we are interested in doing, I think our biggest challenge in 2023 will be identifying what has made an impact and why.

DH: In the short-term, it is making sure that none of our production process changes has negatively affected the past metadata work we spent so much time honing. Once that settles down, it will be determining the best way forward from a publishing perspective in handling true versioning and capturing accurate event data.

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other scholarly publishing organisations?

DP: It can seem daunting, but the small wins can create momentum and do not have to be expensive. Remembering that your publishing program benefits as much as everyone else’s when you deposit more metadata can help refine your short-term and long-term priorities.

DH: Don’t be afraid of making a mess of things. Messes are okay. They aren’t risky. They just reveal the clutter. And clutter gives one reason to clean things up.

THANK YOU for the interview!

About the American Society for Microbiology

The American Society for Microbiology is one of the largest professional societies dedicated to the life sciences and is composed of 30,000 scientists and health practitioners. ASM’s mission is to promote and advance the microbial sciences.

ASM advances the microbial sciences through conferences, publications, certifications and educational opportunities. It enhances laboratory capacity around the globe through training and resources. It provides a network for scientists in academia, industry and clinical settings. Additionally, ASM promotes a deeper understanding of the microbial sciences to diverse audiences. For more information about ASM visit asm.org.

Revised Crossref DOI display guidelines are now active

Ed Pentz — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We have updated our DOI display guidelines as of March 2017, this month! I described the what and the why in my previous blog post New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way and in an email I wrote to all our members in September 2016. I’m pleased to say that the updated Crossref DOI display guidelines are available via this fantastic new website and are now active. Here is the URL of the full set of guidelines in case you want to bookmark it (https://doi.org/10.13003/5jchdy) and a shareable image to spread the word on social media.

This blog is a quick reminder that all Crossref members should now be displaying DOIs in the recommended new format from this month, on any new content you publish online. Please note these guidelines are for Crossref DOIs only, we have nearly 90 million registered but there are others, and not all DOIs are made equal.

The main changes are to display the DOI as a full, linked URL using HTTPS:

https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx

For background on the HTTPS issue please read Geoffrey Bilder’s blog post, Linking DOIs using HTTPS.

What will happen if you don’t update your Crossref DOI display?

We tell members that they should be working towards making the change even if they can’t do it until later - we recognize that it is not always an easy change to make.

However, if members don’t make the change, nothing immediate will happen (Crossref won’t fine you!) although as more members make the change your display will look odd and out of place compared with other members’ content.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way

Ed Pentz — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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

Hey Ho, “doi:” and “dx” have got to go

The updated Crossref DOI Display guidelines recommend that https://doi.org/ be used and not http://dx.doi.org/ in DOI links. Originally the “dx” separated the DOI resolver from the International DOI Foundation (IDF) website but this has changed and the IDF has already updated its recommendations so we are bringing ours in line with theirs.

We are also recommending the use of HTTPS because it makes for more secure browsing. When you use an HTTPS link, the connection between the person who clicks the DOI and the DOI resolver is secure. This means it can’t be tampered with or eavesdropped on. The DOI resolver will redirect to both HTTP and HTTPS URLs.

Timing and backwards compatibility

We are requesting all Crossref member publishers and anyone using Crossref DOIs to start following the updated guidelines as soon as possible. But realistically we are setting a goal of six months for implementation; we realize that updating systems and websites can take time. We at Crossref will also be updating our systems within six months - we already use HTTPS for some of our services and our new website (coming very soon!) will use HTTPS.

An important point about backwards compatibility is that “http://dx.doi.org/” and “http://doi.org/” are valid and will continue to work forever-or as long as Crossref DOIs continue to work-and we plan to be around a long time.

We need to do better

Reflecting on the 2011 update to the display guidelines it’s fair to say that we have been disappointed. It is still much too common to see unlinked DOIs in the form doi:10.1063/1.3599050 or DOI: 10.1629/22161 or even unlinked in this form: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/poc.3551

What’s so wrong with this approach? To demonstrate, please click on this DOI doi:10.1063/1.3599050 - oh, you can’t click on it? How about I send you to a real example of a publisher page. What I’d like you to do is click the following link and then copy the DOI you find there and come back - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/poc.3551.

Are you back? I expect you had to carefully highlight the “10.1063/1.3599050” and then do “edit”, “copy”. That wasn’t too bad but the next step is to put the DOI into an email and send it to someone. But wait - what are they going to do with “10.1063/1.3599050”? It’s useless. If you want it to be useful you’ll have to add “http://doi.org” or https://doi.org/ in the front.

When publishers follow the guidelines it makes things easier - if you go to https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3599050 you’ll note that you can just right click on the full DOI link on the page and get a full menu of options of what to do with it. One of which is to copy the link and then you can easily paste into an email or anywhere else.

However-putting a positive spin on the spotty adherence to the 2011 update to the DOI display guidelines-everyone has another chance with the latest set of updates to make all the changes at once!

More on HTTPS (future-proofing scholarly linking)

We take providing the central linking infrastructure for scholarly publishing seriously. Because we form the link between publisher sites all over the web, it’s important that we do our bit to enable secure browsing from start to finish. In addition, HTTPS is now a ranking signal for Google who gives sites using HTTPS a small ranking boost.

The process of enabling HTTPS on publisher sites will be a long one and, given the number of members we have, it may a while before everyone’s made the transition. But by using HTTPS we are future-proofing scholarly linking on the web.

Some years ago we started the process of making our new services available exclusively over HTTPS. The Crossref Metadata API is HTTPS enabled, and Crossmark and our Assets CDN use HTTPS exclusively. Last year we collaborated with Wikipedia to make all of their DOI links HTTPS. We hope that we’ll start to see more of the scholarly publishing industry doing the same.

So-it’s simple-always make the DOI a full link - https://doi.org/10.1006/jmbi.1995.0238 - even when it’s on the abstract or full text page of the content that the DOI identifies - and use “https://doi.org/”.

Revived: Crossref Books Interest Group

April Ondis — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’re reviving the Books Interest Group, and inviting new members!

After a hiatus, Crossref’s Books Interest Group is back. We’re excited to announce that Emily Ayubi of the American Psychological Association has agreed to chair the group.

In reviving the group, our intention is to create opportunities to talk about issues that are important to scholarly book publishers. For example, we hope to explore whether it is time to revise the Crossref best practices for depositing, versioning, and linking book content.

We are seeking interested members from the book publishing community, and want to hear your ideas for agenda items and topics for discussion.

Our first meeting will be a teleconference held at 11:00 am Eastern time on Wednesday, March 23rd. You will receive dial-in details by email. ** **

If you’d like to join—and we’re hoping you will—please email me at aondis@crossref.org.

Request for Community Comment: registering content before online availability

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is proposing a process to support the registration of content—including DOIs and other metadata—prior to that content being made available, or published, online. We’ve drafted a paper providing background on the reasons we want to support this and highlighting the use cases. One of the main needs is in journal publishing to support registration of Accepted Manuscripts immediately on or shortly after acceptance, and dealing with press embargoes.

Proposal doc for community comment

We request community comment on the __proposed approach as outlined in this report.

Some examples of what we’d like to know:

Are you aware of the issues outlined in this proposal?
Are you aware of the funder and institutional requirements for authors to take action on acceptance of manuscripts for publication in journals?
Do you think the proposed solution and workflows are reasonable?
Are you likely to update your workflow to register content early?
If you are likely to update your workflow, how long do you estimate it will take?
Any other general comments, questions or feedback on anything raised in this document.

Please send comments, feedback and questions to me, Ginny, at feedback@crossref.org. The deadline for comments is February 4th. Thanks!

Does a Crossref DOI identify a "work?"

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Tony’s recent thread on making DOIs play nicely in a linked data world has raised an issue I’ve meant to discuss here for some time- a lot of the thread is predicated on the idea that Crossref DOIs are applied at the abstract “work” level. Indeed, that it what it currently says in our guidelines. Unfortunately, this is a case where theory, practice and documentation all diverge.

When the Crossref linking system was developed it was focused primarily on facilitating persistent linking amongst journals and conference proceedings. The system was quickly adapted to handle books and more recently to handle working papers, technical reports, standards and “components”- a catchall term used to refer to everything from individual article images to database records.

In practice the content outside of the core journals and conference proceedings has accounted for relatively low volume. However, we expect that over the next few years this will change and that books and databases will increasingly drive the future growth in Crossref’s citation linking services. Interestingly, these record types all share characteristics that make them substantially different from the journals and conference proceedings that we have hitherto focused on.

Both books and databases introduce new challenges to technology and policies of our citation linking service. The challenges revolved around two areas:

Structure: Both books and databases can have complex structures and the publishers of this content are likely to require granular identification of these content substructures along with a mechanism for documenting the relationship between these substructures (e.g. this section is part of this chapter which is part of this monograph which is part of this series)
Versioning: Unlike typical journals and conference proceedings, books and database records sometimes change over time.

When confronted with the issues of structure and versioning publishers are often tempted to take shortcuts and decide to simply assign DOIs at the highest level structure and to the “work” instead of a particular “manifestation” or version of that work. Indeed, section 5.5 of Crossref’s [DOI Name Information and Guidelines][2] recommends this. But this approach could have a negative impact on the integrity of the scholarly citation record that Crossref is attempting to maintain.

Fundamentally, Crossref DOIs are aimed at providing a persistent online citation infrastructure for scholarly and professional publishers. Consequently, decisions about where to apply Crossref DOIs should be guided by common expectations about the way in which citations work. Citations are typically used to credit ideas or provide evidence. A reader follows a citation in order to obtain more detail or to verify that an author is accurately representing the item cited. A rule of thumb is that a reader has a reasonable expectation that when they follow a citation, they will be taken to what the author saw when creating the citation. Any divergent behavior could result in the reader concluding that the author was misrepresenting the item cited. A further implication of this is that any changes to content that are likely to effect the crediting or interpretation of the content should result in that changed content getting a new Crossref DOI.

Typically, this means that Crossref DOIs should be probably assigned at the expression level and different expressions should be assigned different Crossref DOIs. This is because assigning a Crossref DOI at the higher “work” level is generally not granular enough to guarantee that a reader following the citation will see what the author saw when creating the citation. For example, one translation of a work might be substantially different from another translation of the same work. Similarly a draft version of a work might be substantially different from the final published version of the work. In each case, resolving a citation to a different expression of the work than the expression that was originally cited might result in the reader interpreting the content differently than the citing author.

In general, different “equivalent manifestations” of the same work can safely be assigned the same Crossref DOI. So, for instance, the HTML formatted version an article and the PDF formatted version of an article can almost always be assigned the same Crossref DOI. Any differences between the two are unlikely to affect the crediting of, or reader’s interpretation of, the work. But sometimes it is even possible that different manifestations of an expression will differ enough to merit different Crossref DOIs. For instance, a semantically enhanced version of an article might require new crediting (e.g. the parties responsible for adding the semantic information) and the resulting semantic enhancement may conceivably alter the reader’s interpretation of the article.

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule about where and when to assign new Crossref DOIs. Instead there is only a guideline, namely:

“Assign new Crossref DOIs to content in a way that will ensure that a reader following the citation will see something as close to what the original author cited as is possible.”

The implications of this to publishers are important, especially when they are assigning DOIs to protean records types. For instance, it may mean that:

Book publishers should be expected to keep old editions of books available for link resolution purposes.
Publishers of content that can change rapidly (e.g. by the second) should provide facilities for creating frozen, archived snapshots of content for citation purposes.
All publishers of protean content should issue guidelines instructing researchers on when it is appropriate to cite a work, manifestation or version.

Crossref needs to actively consider these issues as publishers start assigning Crossref DOIs to more dynamic types of content. Minimally, we should be able to provide publishers with recommendations on how to make dynamic content citable. We may even want to consider enshrining certain types of behavior in our terms and conditions so as to ensure the future integrity of the scholarly citation record.

In short, we need to update our guidelines.

[2]: Crossref DOI display guidelines

PRC Report and “iPub” revisited

Geoffrey Bilder — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so this has nothing to do with any Crossref projects- but there is an interesting new PRC report out by Mark Ware in which he explores how SMEs (small/medium-sized enterprises) make use of scholarly articles and whether the scholarly publishing industry is doing anything to make their lives easier. This is a topic that is close to my heart. For the past few years I’ve been saying (most recently at SSP09) that I think scholarly publishers are much too quick to dismiss the possibility of creating an iTunes-like service for scholarly publications (aka “iPub”). The report certainly seems to indicate that there is an important audience that would benefit from such a service (SMEs) and even goes so far as to cite my occasional rants on the subject. The summary of my iPub argument has been that:

A very large percentage of the web visits that hit publishers web sites come from sources that are unrecognised. That is, they don’t come from a subscribing institution and they don’t seem to come from a registered user or anybody who has visited the site previously. For many publishers the level of such unrecognised visitors can amount to over 90% of all the traffic that hits their sites. Most industries would look at this percentage and work hard to figure out how to monetize some of it. Our industry seems to treat it like “noise”, reasoning that only people in recognised academic and professional institutions are going to desire or understand the content on scholarly journal sites.
Evidence from the NSF shows that significantly more than 50% of US students who graduate with an S&E degree end up employed outside of directly S&E related fields. This represents a large percentage of potential consumers of scholarly and professional publications who are not part of a recognised academic or professional institution. SMEs anybody?
These potential consumers are faced with a bewildering variety of sources for their content. They have to deal with multiple publisher sites with different interfaces and different PPV checkout procedures. And they have to navigate all this without the aid of library finding tools or the professional researcher’s understanding the scholarly journal environment. It is no wonder that they give up hope once they land on our abstract pages and face the gauntlet of another PPV checkout system.

It seems to me that the industry could provide a single interface and PPV shopping cart interface targeted at allowing people who work outside of traditional subscribing institutions to easily purchase individual article downloads from scholarly publishers. The system would be modelled at least in part by Apple’s iTunes, a system that has been lauded (and denounced) for revolutionising the way in which consumers buy music online. The chief virtues of the iTunes system are often cited as being:

It contains a critical mass of content
It provides a simple and consistent user interface
It has a simple and inexpensive pricing model
It disaggregated content (per song purchases)
It interfaced transparently with the iPod.

A scholarly publishing “iPub” system could seek to emulate many of these strengths but not all. Clearly such a system could not impose uniform pricing or dictate pricing, as that would be anti-competitive. The PRC report makes this same point.

Some, including the PRC report, also claim that the publishing industry has no equivalent of the “iPod” and that this would be a weakness of the system. I don’t agree with this- I think that the “iPod” in this case is currently called “paper.” In the future we will almost certainly migrate to some iPod/Kindle-like device, but as far as fulfilling most of the iPod’s functionality (portable rendering of the content) right now, I suspect paper fits the bill.

Finally, there is a another oft-expressed concern that such a system might confuse channels for existing audiences and that librarians in particular would be very hostile to such a system. The truth is, I don’t know how librarians would react to such a system. The few I’ve mentioned it to certainly seemed amenable to the idea. Maybe this is where the PRC should do some follow-up research?

In any case, it seems to me that there is potentially much to be gained by simply providing an easy PPV experience where users don’t have to register with multiple sites and cope with multiple shopping cart applications. Publishers can’t seriously think that they gain competitive advantage through their shopping carts? If not, then why not standardise on a uniform interface that is easily purchased from? Perhaps it doesn’t have to look like iTunes but can instead look like PayPal (PayPub?). Providing a simple mechanism like this might enable the industry to meet the needs of important and often overlooked audiences. I keep wondering if CCC could help publishers do something here?

Strategic Reading

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Allen Renear and Carole Palmer have just published an article titled “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing” in the current issue of Science (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784). I’m particularly happy to see this paper published because I actually got to witness the genesis of these ideas in my living room back in 2006. Since then, Allen and Carole’s ideas have profoundly influenced my thinking on the application of technology to scholarly communication.

Those who have seen me speak at conferences recently will have heard me do an awful lot of ranting about the how publishers and librarians need to help researchers practice the time-honored art of “reading avoidance” (or as Renear and Palmer politely put it- “strategic reading”). I even managed to squeeze this rant into a recent interview I did with Wiley-Blackwell.

The essence of my argument has been that our industries need not be bamboozled by the technical jargon and messianic hand-waving that typically accompany discussions of new technology trends like “web 2.0”, “text-mining”, “the semantic web”, “micro-blogging”, etc. This is because there is a fairly simple way for us to understand the relative import (or lack thereof) of new technologies to scholarly communication and that is to ask the following question:

“Can the application of this technology in the realm of scholarly communication help researchers to read less?”

If the answer is “yes”, then you’d better pay very close attention to it.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say the history of scholarly publishing can be characterized by the successful adoption of conventions and tools that help researchers read strategically.

Now I have something to cite when I rant.

Anyway, congratulations to Allen & Carole.

Word Add-in for Scholarly Authoring and Publishing

Crossref — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Last week Pablo Fernicola sent me email announcing that Microsoft have finally released a beta of their Word plugin for marking-up manuscripts with the NLM DTD. I say “finally” because we’ve know this was on the way and have been pretty excited to see it. We once even hoped that MS might be able to show the plug-in at the ALPSP session on the NLM DTD, but we couldn’t quite manage it.

The plugin is targeted at production/editorial staff, but, of course, it will be interesting to see if any of this work can be pushed back to the author. I won’t hold my breath on the latter score, but it will be fun to watch.

One thing I would note is that the NLM DTD can also be used in the humanities and social sciences, so, frankly, I think they should market it more broadly.

Anyway- the plugin can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

And Pablo has setup a blog where testers can discuss the add-in.

And there is also an entry for the project on the Microsoft Research site (an interesting place to peruse, if you have a moment).

Congatulations to Pablo and his team.

On Google Knol

Crossref — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape.

I love the comment an authority:

“Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.”

And so I suppose this means they are assigning author identifiers….

Oh, shiny!

Crossref — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick.

Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organisations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works. While researchers might prefer electronic versions of the publications for their day-to-day work, print versions of the same publications seemed to continue to play a critical role as an “awareness tool.” I know that, for this very reason, several NGO/IGOs that I’ve spoken to have despaired of ever ramping down their print operations.

I think that the OECD might have figured out a solution to this dilemma. It’s difficult to describe how viscerally satisfying it was to receive one of these Factbook USB-sticks. From the way in which the other meeting attendees swarmed around Toby as he was handing them out, I think that they might have had the same reaction.

As we headed back to London on the Eurostar, I almost immediately popped the USB stick into my laptop and started browsing through the Factbook, much as I would have thumbed through a print version of the same (although -truth be told- I would have been tempted to conveniently “forget” the print version in order to not have to shlep it from Paris back to Oxford).

In short, I think the system works. Kudos to the OECD for a simple, inexpensive and creative experiment in e-publishing.

Resource Maps

Tony Hammond — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Last week we had a second face-to-face of the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange) Technical Committee in New York, the meeting being hosted courtesy of Google. (Hence the snap here taken from the terrace of Google’s canteen with its gorgeous view of midtown Manhattan. And the food’s not too shabby either. ;~)

The main input to the meeting was this discussion document: Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective. This document we feel has now reached a level of maturity that we wanted to share with a wider audience. We invite feedback either directly at ore@openarchives.org or indirectly via yours truly.

The document attempts to describe the problem domain - that of describing a scholarly publication as an aggregation of resources on the Web - and to put that squarely into the Web architecture context. What the initiative is seeking to provide is machine descriptions of those resources and their relationships, something that we are inclining to call “resource maps” and as underpinning we are making use of the notion of “named graphs” from ongoing semantic web research. Essentially these resource maps are machine-readable descriptions of participating resources (in a scholarly object - both core resources and related resources) and the relationships between those resources, the whole set of assertions about those resources being named (i.e. having a URI as identifier) and having provenance information attached, e.g. publisher, date of publication, version information (still under discussion). It is envisaged that these compound object descriptions may be available in a variety of serializations from a published, object-specific URL (i.e. a good old-fashioned Web address) but some honest-to-goodness XML serialization is a likely to be one of the candidates. No surprises here, then.

Below is a schematic from the paper which shows the publication of a resource map (or named graph) corresponding to the compound object which logically represents a scholarly publication. For those objects of immediate interest to Crossref these would likely be identified with DOI’s although there is no restriction in OAI-ORE on the identifier to be used - other than it be a URI.

Update: For a couple posts from some other members of the ORE TC see here (Peter Murray, OhioLINK) and here (Pete Johnston, Eduserv).

RSC’s Project Prospect v1.1

rkidd — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We updated our Project Prospect articles today to release v1.1, with a pile of look & feel improvements to the HTML views and links. The most interesting technical addition is the launch of our enhanced RSS feeds, where we have updated our existing feeds for enhanced articles. These now include ontology terms and primary compounds both visually (as text terms and 2D images) and within the RDF - using the OBO in OWL representation and the info:inchi specification mentioned here by Tony only a few weeks ago.

The enhanced entries will soon become more common as we concentrate our enhancements on our Advance Articles, but the current example below from our Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences feed is lovely. RDF code after the jump - just as beautiful to the parents…

So the RDF code for the OBO terms and InChIs looks like this:

<tt><br /> <rdf:li><br /> <content:item rdf:about="info:inchi/InChI=1/C20H28O/c1-16(8-6-9-17(2)13-15-21)11-12-19-18(3)10-7-14-20(19,4)5/h6,8-9,11-13,15H,7,10,14H2,1-5H3/b9-6-,12-11+,16-8+,17-13+"/><br /> </rdf:li><br /> <rdf:li><content:item rdf:about="http://purl.org/obo/owl/CL#CL:0000210"/><br /> </rdf:li><br /> </tt>

We now have over five hundred 2007 articles enhanced, so we’ve brought the majority back into controlled access. There are always examples from each journal freely available.

Welcome to “Otmi-discuss”

Tony Hammond — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick note to mention that we’ve now set up a new mailing list otmi-discuss@crossref.org for public discussion of OTMI - the Open Text Mining Interface proposed by Nature. See the list information page here for details on subscribing to the list and to access the mail archives.

And many thanks to the Crossref folks for hosting this for us!

Open Content

Tony Hammond — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In light of my earlier post on OTMI, the mail copied below from Sebastian Hammer at Index Data about open content may be of interest. They are looking to compile a listing of web sources of open content - see this page for further details.

(Via XML4lib and other lists.)

_“Hi All,

(apologies for any cross-posting)

At Index Data, we have long felt that there were really interesting

sources of open content out there that was not being utilized as well as

it could be because it was hidden away in websites. We’re a software

company specializing in information retrieval applications, so

eventually we asked ourselves, ‘what could we all do with this stuff if

it were exposed using our favorite open standards’.

We thought it was worth finding out, so we have set up processes to

regularly retrieve indexes of major open content resources, and make

them available using SRU and Z39.50. We’ve started with the Open Content

Alliance and Project Gutenberg (two quite different approaches to

producing free eBooks), Wikipedia, the Open Directory Project, and

OAIster. More is on the way.

Connection information and more details are available at

https://web.archive.org/web/20070325152849/http://indexdata.com//opencontent/.

The kind of metadata you can get from these sources varies. The Open

Content Alliance captures MARC records along with the scanned books,

which makes for excellent metadata. Many of the others produce some

variation of DublinCore. Our service, through either Z39.50 or SRU/W,

exposes both MARC (or MARCXML) and DublinCore in XML for all sources.

We’ve created a new mailing list to help inform people of changes to the

services, new resources available, etc. Signup at

http://lists.indexdata.dk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/oclist/ .

We sincerely hope you will find these resources exciting and useful.

Feel free to get in touch if you have questions or input.

-Sebastian

—

Sebastian Hammer, Index Data

quinn@indexdata.com www.indexdata.com

Ph: (603) 209-6853 Fax: (866) 383-4485”_