Latest blog posts
Ginny Hendricks
2024 December 12

A progress update and a renewed commitment to community

Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata. In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why.

...Find out more
Rosa Morais Clark
2024 December 09

A summary of our Annual Meeting

The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossref’s latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections. Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025.

...Find out more
Lucy Ofiesh
2024 December 07

2024 POSI audit

Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles. In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.

...Find out more
Ed Pentz
2024 December 05

Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref

In June 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas: The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!

...Find out more
  • Menu
search

Warnings, Caveats and Weasel Words

Most of the experiments linked to here are running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment. They may disappear without warning and/or perform erratically. If one of them isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again.

QR Code Generator

 2 minute read.
Note: This experiment has been retired. This description has been kept for reference, but many of the links and/or services that appear below no longer work.

You might also be interested in this handy resource for determining if you should be using QR Codes.

QR Codes are a form of barcode that can be easily scanned and used by mobile phones, web-cams, etc. A QR code can include encoded data, so, for instance, they are often used in Japan and other countries to encode URLs for display in magazines, on billboards, on packaging, etc.

For example, the following is the QR Code for the article “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing” by Allen Renear and Carole Palmer.

Sample QR code

API

Crossref has created a sample API that will take a Crossref DOI and turn it into a QR Code. The QR Code will include the title of the document pointed to by the Crossref DOI as well as the “htttp://dx.doi.org” URL of that will allow you to link to that item. Most mobile phone QR Code readers will allow you to bookmark, share or link to the URLs thus encoded.

The API is pretty straight-forward and is of the form:

http://qrcode.labs.crossref.org/[doi]

So the URL to generate the above QR Code was:

http://qrcode.labs.crossref.org/10.1126/science.1157784

If you want to try out this technology, you might try installing the iPhone application QuickMark from the Apple app store.

Note that the API doesn’t currently let you vary the size or encoding level of the QR Code. If there is enough interest in this functionality, we might add it.

Applications

So what can the qr-encoded Crossref DOI be used for? Damn if we know. Minimally, they could be added to the cover pages of PDFs so that researchers could easily bookmark a link to any paper articles they are reading. Perhaps they could also be added to the posters on poster sessions at conferences? Heck, maybe we could persuade researchers to print the QR-codes of their publications on t-shirts that they could then wear to conferences…

Or maybe not.

But seriously, we did this because it was easy and pretty cool. We’re not sure of the applications yet, so that’s why we thought we should release it and see what people can think of.

Page owner: Crossref   |   Last updated 2013-January-20