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Problems with dx.doi.org on January 20th 2015- what we know.

Hell’s teeth.

So today (January 20th, 2015) the DOI HTTP resolver at dx.doi.org started to fail intermittently around the world. The doi.org domain is managed by CNRI on behalf of the International DOI Foundation. This means that the problem affected all DOI registration agencies including Crossref, DataCite, mEDRA etc. This also means that more popularly known end-user services like FigShare and Zenodo were affected. The problem has been fixed, but the fix will take some time to propagate throughout the DNS system. You can monitor the progress here:

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/doi.org

Now for the embarrassing stuff…

Introducing the Crossref Labs DOI Chronograph

tl;dr http://chronograph.labs.crossref.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au

At Crossref we mint DOIs for publications and send them out into the world, but we like to hear how they’re getting on out there. Obviously, DOIs are used heavily within the formal scholarly literature and for citations, but they’re increasingly being used outside of formal publications in places we didn’t expect. With our DOI Event Tracking / ALM pilot project we’re collecting information about how DOIs are mentioned on the open web to try and build a picture about new methods of citation.

Linking data and publications

Geoffrey Bilder

Geoffrey Bilder – 2014 September 21

In CollaborationDataCite

Do you want to see if a Crossref DOI (typically assigned to publications) refers to DataCite DOIs (typically assigned to data)? Here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150121025249/http://api.labs.crossref.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/graph/doi/10.4319/lo.1997.42.1.0001

Conversely, do you want to see if a DataCite DOI refers to Crossref DOIs? VoilĂ :

https://web.archive.org/web/20150321190744/http://api.labs.crossref.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/graph/doi/10.1594/pangaea.185321

Background

“How can we effectively integrate data into the scholarly record?” This is the question that has, for the past few years, generated an unprecedented amount of handwringing on the part researchers, librarians, funders and publishers. Indeed, this week I am in Amsterdam to attend the 4th RDA plenary in which this topic will no doubt again garner a lot of deserved attention.

Citation needed

Remember when I said that the Wikipedia was the 8th largest referrer of DOI links to published research? This despite only a fraction of eligible references in the free encyclopaedia using DOIs.

We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia.

This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references. Crossref will support the development and maintenance of Wikipedia’s citation tools on Wikipedia. This work will include bug fixes and performance improvements for existing tools, extending the tools to enable Wikipedia contributors to more easily look up and insert DOIs, and providing a “linkback” mechanism that alerts relevant parties when a persistent identifier is used in a Wikipedia reference.

♫ Researchers just wanna have funds ♫

Cindy Lauper

photo credit

Summary

You can use a new Crossref API to query all sorts of interesting things about who funded the research behind the content Crossref members publish.

Background

Back in May 2013 we launched Crossref’s FundRef service. It can be summarized like this:

  • Crossref keeps and manages a canonical list of Funder Names (ephemeral) and associated identifiers (persistent).
  • We encourage our members (or anybody, really- the list is available under A CC-Zero license waiver) to use this list for collecting information on who funded the research behind the content that our members publish.
  • We then ask that our members deposit this data in their normal Crossref metadata deposits.

And that was cool.

Many Metrics. Such Data. Wow.

[many_metrics

Crossref Labs loves to be the last to jump on an internet trend, so what better than than to combine the Doge meme with altmetrics?

Note: The API calls below have been superceeded with the development of the Event Data project. See the latest API documentation for equivalent functionality

Want to know how many times a Crossref DOI is cited by the Wikipedia?

DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right?

 

The South Park movie , “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” has a DOI:

a) http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.5240/B1FA-0EEC-C316-3316-3A73-L

So does the pornographic movie, “Young Sex Crazed Nurses”:

b) http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.5240/4CF3-57AB-2481-651D-D53D-Q

And the following DOI points to a fake article on a “Google-Based Alien Detector”:

c) http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.6084/m9.figshare.93964

And the following DOI refers to an infamous fake article on literary theory:

d) http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.2307/466856

This scholarly article discusses the entirely fictitious Australian “Drop Bear”:

Easily add publications to your ORCID profile

You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.

When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.

Crossref Metadata Search++

We have just released a bunch of new functionality for Crossref Metadata Search. The tool now supports the following features:

  • A completely new UI
  • Faceted searches
  • Copying of search results as formatted citations using CSL
  • COinS, so that you can easily import results into Zotero and other document management tools
  • An API, so that you can integrate Crossref Metadata Search into your own applications, plugins, etc.
  • Basic OpenSearch support- so that you can integrate Crossref Metadata Search into your browser’s search bar.
  • Searching for a particular Crossref DOI
  • Searching for a particular Crossref ShortDOI
  • Searching for articles in a particular journal via the journal’s ISSN

At the moment, Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS) is a Crossref Labs project and, as such, should be used with some trepidation. Our goal is to release CRMS as a production service ASAP, but we wanted to get public feedback on the service before making the move to a production system.

PatentCite

If you’ve ever thought that scholarly citation practice was antediluvian and perverse- you should check-out patents some day.

Over the past year of so Crossref has been working with Cambia and the The Lens to explore how we can better link scholarly literature to and from the patent literature. The first object of our collaboration was to attempt to link patents hosted on the new, beta version of The Lens to the Scholarly literature. To do this, Crossref and Cambia been enhancing Crossref’s citation matching mechanisms in order to better resolve the wide variety of eclectic and terse patent citation styles to Crossref DOIs.