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.

click on thumbnail to see larger image

Clicking on this button allows you to connect CRMDS to your ORCID profile and authorises CRMDS to add publications to your profile. First, if you are not already logged into ORCID, CRMDS will ask ORCID to log you in:

click on thumbnail to see larger image

Once you have logged in, ORCID will ask you if you want to allow CRMDS to be able to view and update your ORCID profile:

click on thumbnail to see larger image

After you authorise CRMDS to access your profile, you will be returned to the CRMDS screen and the top right corner of the CRMDS page will indicate that you have connected to your ORCID profile (note, you can always de-authorise CRMDS from accessing your ORCID profile in your ORCID settings):

click on thumbnail to see larger image

Once you are logged in, you can enter search terms that are likely to return records of your publications:

click on thumbnail to see larger image

Each search result will show an icon telling you whether that particular item is visible in your ORCID profile. If the item is not in your ORCID profile, you see an icon like this:

And if the item is already in your ORCID profile, you will see an icon like this:

In the following search results you can see that 1 item is already in Josiah Carberry’s profile, and 2 items are not:

click on thumbnail to see larger image

Clicking on the “Add to Profile” button will confirm that you want to add the specified publication to your ORCID profile:

click on thumbnail to see larger image

After clicking on “Yes” to add the publication to your profile, the search results will refresh to reflect that the item has been added.

click on thumbnail to see larger image

You can then just continue searching for and adding any publications that are not in your ORCID profile.

Note that, occasionally, you may see an orange icon that says that an item is “Not Visible”

click on thumbnail to see larger image

This only occurs when you have previously added an item to your profile using CRMDS and then either:

Set the ORCID privacy for that particular work item to “Private” in your ORCID profile.
Deleted the work from your ORCID profile.

Unfortunately, CRMDS has no way to determine which of these two events occurred However, If you click on the “Not Visible” icon, you will be prompted with two ways to resolve this issue. Either you can:

Reset the privacy settings on the specified work to “Public” or “Limited”
Confirm to CRMDS that you have deleted the item from your profile.

click on thumbnail to see larger image

If the issue was your privacy settings, then once you have changed the privacy settings to public/limited you can simply click on the “Refresh” button and CRMDS will reflect the correct status of the work.

The best way to avoid this kind of confusion is to go to your ORCID settings and set the default privacy level for “works” to either “limited” or “public.”

CrossRef Metadata Search is still a “CrossRef Labs” project and, as such, we are very interested to hear feedback on this new ORCID functionality for CRMDS. Please send comments, etc. to:

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.

You can see the results of these ongoing attempts on the The Lens beta site where all of The Len’s ~~8 million+~~ 80 million+ patents and applications (obtained through subscriptions with WIPO, USPTO, EPO and IP Australia) are starting to be linked directly to the scholarly literature. See, for example:

http://beta.lens.org/lens/patent/US_RE42150_E1/citations

CrossRef has taken this matched data and has now released a CrossRef Labs *experimental* service , called PatentCIte, that allows you to take any CrossRef DOI and see what Patents in the The Lens system cite it.

As with all CrossRef Labs services- this one is likely to be:

a) As stable as the global economy
c) As reliable as a UK train
ii) Out-of-date. It is based on a snapshot of CrossRef /Lens data.
1) As accurate as my list ordering

Howzat for an SLA?

As we get feedback from CrossRef’s membership and as we gain more experience linking Patents to and from the scholarly literature, we will explore including this functionality in our production CitedBY service. But until then- please send us your feedback on this experimental service.

CrossRef and DataCite unify support for HTTP content negotiation

Last year CrossRef and DataCite announced support for HTTP content
negotiation for DOI names. Today, we are pleased to report further
collaboration on the topic. We think it is very important that the two
largest DOI Registration Agencies work together in order to provide
metadata services to DOI names.

The current implementation is documented in detail at
http://crosscite.org/cn. The documentation explains
HTTP content negotiation as implemented by both Registration Agencies
and provides a list of supported content types.

An example application of HTTP content negotiation is a citation
formatting service. You can try it at http://crosscite.org/citeproc.
This service will accept DOIs from both CrossRef and DataCite, unlike the previous formatting service which accepted
only CrossRef DOI names (http://citation.crrd.dyndns.org).
This is
possible because CrossRef and DataCite support a shared, common
metadata format. When you input a DOI into the formatting service, it
doesn’t know where the DOI was registered. The service will make an
HTTP content negotiation request to the global DOI resolver specifying which format of the metadata should be
returned in the HTTP Accept header. The global DOI resolver will
notice (Accept header!) that this is not a regular DOI resolution
request; it will turn to CrossRef or DataCite accordingly for the
relevant metadata instead of redirecting to a landing page. The format
of metadata is shared between both registration agencies so the
formatting service can interpret it without knowledge of the DOI origin.

In summary HTTP content negotiation lets you process a DOI’s
metadata without knowledge of its origin or specifics of the
registration agency.

If you have any problems, email us at tech@datacite.org or
labs@crossref.org. For general discussion please kindly leave a
comment below.

PDF-Extract

PDF-EXTRACT

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

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

Continue reading →

DOIs for PHD Comics’ Valentine’s Day Reading List

PHD Comics has posted its Valentine’s Day Reading list.

Without DOIs!

So in order to preserve the scholarly citation record, we’ve resolved those that have DOIs….

Title: The St. Valentine’s Day Frontal Passage

Citation: Sassen, K, 1980, ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Frontal Passage’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 61, no. 2, p. 122.

CrossRef DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1980)061<0122:TSVDFP>2.0.CO;2

Title: SUICIDE AND HOMICIDE ON ST. VALENTINE’S DAY

Citation: LESTER, D, 1990, ‘SUICIDE AND HOMICIDE ON ST. VALENTINE’S DAY’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 71, no. 7, p. 994.

CrossRef DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2466/PMS.71.7.994-994

Title: The St. Valentineʼs Day Massacre

Citation: Eckert, W, 1980, ‘The St. Valentineʼs Day Massacre’, The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 67-70.

CrossRef DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/00000433-198003000-00011

Title: For Valentine’s Day

Citation: Kutzner, H, 2001, ‘For Valentine’s Day’, Cancer, vol. 91, no. 4, pp. 804-805.

CrossRef DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1097-0142(20010215)91:4<804::AID-CNCR1067>3.3.CO;2-K

Turning DOIs into formatted citations

Today two new content types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for CrossRef DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales. In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported.
First off, if you’d like to try citation formatting without using content negotiation, there’s a simple web UI that allows input of a DOI, style and locale selection.
If you’re more into accessing the web via your favorite programming language, have a look at these content negotiation curl examples. To make a request for the new “text/bibliography” content type:
$ curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 @article{Atkins_Gershell_2002, title={From the analyst's couch: Selective anticancer drugs}, volume={1}, DOI={10.1038/nrd842}, number={7}, journal={Nature Reviews Drug Discovery}, author={Atkins, Joshua H. and Gershell, Leland J.}, year={2002}, month={Jul}, pages={491-492}}
A locale can be specified with the “locale” content type parameter, like this:
$ curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=mla; locale=fr-FR" http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 Atkins, Joshua H., et Leland J. Gershell. « From the analyst's couch: Selective anticancer drugs ». Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 1.7 (2002): 491-492.
You may want to process metadata through CSL yourself. For this use case, there’s another new content type, “application/citeproc+json” that returns metadata in a citeproc-friendly JSON form:
$ curl -LH "Accept: application/citeproc+json" http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 {"volume":"1","issue":"7","DOI":"10.1038/nrd842","title":"From the analyst's couch: Selective anticancer drugs","container-title":"Nature Reviews Drug Discovery","issued":{"date-parts":[[2002,7]]},"author":[{"family":"Atkins","given":"Joshua H."},{"family":"Gershell","given":"Leland J."}],"page":"491-492","type":"article-journal"}
Finally, to retrieve lists of supported styles and locales, either hit these URLs:

or check out the CSL style and locale repositories.
There’s one big caveat to all this. The CSL processor will do its best with CrossRef metadata which can unfortunately be quite patchy at times. There may be pieces of metadata missing, inaccurate metadata or even metadata items stored under the wrong field, all resulting in odd-looking formatted citations. Most of the time, though, it works.

Determining the CrossRef membership status of a domain

We’ve been asked a few times if it is possible to determine whether or not a particular domain name belongs to a CrossRef member. To address this we’re launching another small service that performs something like a “reverse look-up” of URLs and domain names to DOIs and CrossRef member status.
The service provides an API that will attempt to reverse look-up a URL to a DOI and return the membership status (member or non-member) of the root domain of the URL. In practice resolving URLs to DOIs has substantial limitations – many publishers redirect the resolution URL of DOIs to other online content and URLs become clogged up with session IDs and other cruft appearing in their query parameters. All of this means it is unlikely that the URLs that appear to be the end result of DOI resolution are actually the URLs pointed to.
However, it’s also possible to provide only a host name, in which case, as with a URL, the CrossRef membership status for the root domain will be returned.
There’s also a downloadable list of hashed domains that belong to CrossRef members which will be useful to those who want to determine the membership status of a domain locally. Also, a bookmarklet allows anyone to easily check a web page they are looking at to see if the domain it is hosted on belongs to a CrossRef member.
Check it out over at the documentation page.

DataCite supporting content negotiation

In April CrossRef launched content negotiation support for its DOIs. At the time I cheekily called-out DataCite to start supporting content negotiation as well.

Edward Zukowski (DataCite’s resident propellor-head) took up the challenge with gusto and, as of September 22nd DataCite has also been supporting content negotiation for its DOIs. This means that one million more DOIs are now linked-data friendly. Congratulations to Ed and the rest of the team at DataCite.

We hope this is a trend. Back in June Knowledge Exchange organized a seminar on Persistent Object Identifiers. One of the outcomes of the meeting was “Den Haag Manifesto” a document outlining five relatively simple steps that different persistent identifier systems could take in order to increase interoperability. Most of these steps involved adopting linked data principles including support for content negotiation. We look forward to hearing about other persistent identifiers adopting these principles over the next year.

Having said that, this time I will refrain from calling-out anybody specifically…

Family Names Service

Today I’m announcing a small web API that wraps a family name database here at CrossRef R&D. The database, built from CrossRef’s metadata, lists all unique family names that appear as contributors to articles, books, datasets and so on that are known to CrossRef. As such the database likely accounts for the majority of family names represented in the scholarly record.

The web API comes with two services: a family name detector that will pick out potential family names from chunks of text and a family name autocompletion system.

Very brief documentation can be found here along with a jQuery example of autocompletion.

The database is still in development so there may be some oddities and inaccuracies in there. Right now one obvious omission from the name list that I hope to address soon are double-worded names such as “von Neumann”. We’re not proposing this database as an authority but rather something that backs a practical service for family name detection and autocompletion.