connecting things: bioGUID, iSpiders and DOI
David Shorthouse and Rod Page have developed some great tools for linking references by tying together a number of services and using the CrossRef OpenURL interface amongst other things. See David's post - Gimme That Scientific Paper Part III and Rod's post on OpenURL and using ParaTools - "OpenURL and Spiders".
Unfortunately our planned changes to the CrossRef OpenURL interface (the 100 queries per day limit in particular) caused some concern for David ("CrossRef Takes a Step Back") - but make sure you read the comments to see my response!
We decided to drop the 100 per day query limit for the OpenURL interface and there will be no charges for non-commercial use of the interface - http://www.crossref.org/requestaccount/
We want to encourage innovative uses of CrossRef services and disseminate DOIs as effectively as possible so we appreciate feedback and encourage the type of development David and Rod are doing. It will be interesting to see if what they are doing has wider applicability. Maybe CrossRef could host a webpage to point to tools like this and encourage more development?
Comments
Dropping the 100 queries per day limit is a great move. Some of the work I do depends on being able to batch query a large number of references, such as searching for DOIs for literature in the taxonomic database ITIS. Taxonomists deal with a vast literature that is widely scattered across many sources, and dates back to the time of Linneaus. Unfortunately, almost all taxonomic databases store lists of literature in the form of text citations, which the user has to figure out how to find. Having identifiers such as DOIs makes discovering digital versions of these papers much easier, as well as facilitating reference matching.
Posted by: Rod Page | September 8, 2007 03:08 AM
That's fantastic idea, Ed and I would most certainly contribute. CrossRef developers are welcome to lift the JavaScript file as are any webpage authors that have lists of references to see how it works. It is available here: http://canadianarachnology.dyndns.org/bioGUID/jsonbioGUID.js. So, here's the first contribution.
Posted by: David Shorthouse | September 8, 2007 11:48 PM