CrossTech

Was outraged (outraged, I tell you) that one of my favorite online comics, PhD, didn't include DOIs in their recent bibliography of Christmas-related citations.. So I've compiled them below.

We care about these things so that you don't have to. Bet you will sleep better at night knowing this.

Or perhaps not...

A Christmas Reading List... with DOIs.

Citation:  Biggs, R, Douglas, A, Macfarlane, R, Dacie, J, Pitney, W, Merskey, C & O'Brien, J, 1952, 'Christmas Disease', BMJ, vol. 2, no. 4799, pp. 1378-1382.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.2.4799.1378

Title:  More Than a Labor of Love: Gender Roles and Christmas Gift Shopping
Citation:  Fischer, E & Arnold, S, 1990, 'More Than a Labor of Love: Gender Roles and Christmas Gift Shopping', Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 333.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/208561

Title:  Looking at Christmas trees in the nucleolus
Citation:  Scheer, U, Xia, B, Merkert, H & Weisenberger, D, 1997, 'Looking at Christmas trees in the nucleolus', Chromosoma, vol. 105, no. 7-8, pp. 470-480.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s004120050209

Title:  The Vela glitch of Christmas 1988
Citation:  McCulloch, P, Hamilton, P, McConnell, D & King, E, 1990, 'The Vela glitch of Christmas 1988', Nature, vol. 346, no. 6287, pp. 822-824.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/346822a0

Title:  Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and New Year's Than at Any Other Time: The Holidays as a Risk Factor for Death
Citation:  Phillips, D, 2004, 'Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and New Year's Than at Any Other Time: The Holidays as a Risk Factor for Death', Circulation, vol. 110, no. 25, pp. 3781-3788.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.0000151424.02045.F7

Title:  Red Crabs in Rain Forest, Christmas Island: Biotic Resistance to Invasion by an Exotic Snail
Citation:  Lake, P & O'Dowd, D, 1991, 'Red Crabs in Rain Forest, Christmas Island: Biotic Resistance to Invasion by an Exotic Snail', Oikos, vol. 62, no. 1, p. 25.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3545442

Title:  The Carvedilol Hibernation Reversible Ischaemia Trial, Marker of Success (CHRISTMAS) study Methodology of a randomised, placebo controlled, multicentre study of carvedilol in hibernation and heart failure
Citation:  Pennell, D, 2000, 'The Carvedilol Hibernation Reversible Ischaemia Trial, Marker of Success (CHRISTMAS) study Methodology of a randomised, placebo controlled, multicentre study of carvedilol in hibernation and heart failure', International Journal of Cardiology, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 265-274.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0167-5273(99)00198-9

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 06:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Inspired by Google's recent promotion of QR Codes, I thought it might be fun to experiment with encoding a CrossRef DOI and a bit of metadata into one of the critters. I've put a short write-up of the experiment on the CrossRef Labs site, which includes a demonstration of how you can generate a QR Code for any given CrossRef DOI.

Put them on postcards and send them to your friends for the holidays. Tattoo them on your pets. The possibilities are endless.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was happy to read David Shotton's recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.^*

Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the "typed link", a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his 1983 Ph.D. thesis.. Basically, Trigg points out something that should be fairly obvious- a citation (i.e. "a link") is not always a "vote" in favor of the thing being cited.

In fact, there are all sorts of reasons that an author might want to cite something. They might be elaborating on the item cited, they might be critiquing the item cited, they might even be trying to refute the item cited (For an exhaustive and entertaining survey of the use and abuse of citations in the humanities, Anthony Grafton's, The Footnote: A Curious History, is a rich source of examples)

Unfortunately, the naive assumption that a citation is tantamount to a vote of confidence has become inshrined in everything from the way in which we measure scholarly reputation, to the way in which we fund universities and the way in which search engines rank their results. The distorting affect of this assumption is profound. If nothing else, it leads to a perverse situation in which people will often discuss books, articles, and blog postings that they disagree with without actually citing the relevant content, just so that they can avoid inadvertently conferring "wuffie" on the item being discussed. This can't be right.

Having said that, there has been a half-hearted attempt to introduce a gross level of link typology with the introduction of the "nofollow" link attribute- an initiative started by Google in order to try to address the increasing problem of "Spamdexing". But this is a pretty ham-fisted form of link typing- particularly in the way it is implemented by the Wikipedia where CrossRef DOI links to formally published scholarly literature have a "nofollow" attribute attached to them but, inexplicably, items with a PMID are not so hobbled (view the HTML source of this page, for example). Essentially, this means that, the Wikipedia is a black-hole of reputation. That is, it absorbs reputation (through links too the Wikipedia), but it doesn't let reputation back out again. Hell, I feel dirty for even linking to it here ;-).

Anyway, scholarly publishers should certainly read Shotton's article because it is full of good, and practical ideas about what can can be done with today's technology in order to help us move beyond the "digital incunabula" that the industry is currently churning out. The sample semantic article that Shotton's team created is inspirational and I particularly encourage people to look at the source file for the ontology-enhanced bibliography which reveals just how much more useful metadata can be associated with the humble citation.

And now I wonder whether CiteULike, Connotea, 2Collab or Zotero will consider adding support for the CItation Typing Ontology into their respective services?

* Disclosure:

a) I am on the editorial board of Learned Publishing
b) CrossRef has consulted with David Shotton on the subject of semantically enhancing journal articles

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 06:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Discussions around "contributor Ids" (aka "Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that CrossRef has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data.

Well, I'm delighted to say that said group of researchers(at the GEN2PHEN project) have created a "Researcher Identification Primer" website in which they outline the many use-cases and issues around creating a mechanism for unambiguously identifying and/or authenticating researchers. This looks like a great resource and I expect it will serve as a useful focus for further discussion around the issue.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So the other day Noel O'Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the CrossRef APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year. So I dug up my half-finished code, cleaned it up a bit and have posted the results.

Note that the back-end that supports the plugins has been moved to more stable machines and the index is now being automatically updated with journal and conference proceeding deposits (sorry, no books yet).

Also note that we are hoping that others will look at the code for the WordPress, Moveable Type and Ubiquity plugins and create more such extensions. If you do, please let us know about them at citation-plugin@crossref.org.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossTech is two years old (less one month) and we have now seen some 145 posts. Breaking the posts down by poster we arrive at the following chart:

Note this is not any real attempt at vainglory, more a simple excuse to play with the wonderful Google Chart API. Also, above I've taken the liberty of putting up an image (.png), although the chart could have been generated on the fly from this link (or tinyurl here).

What is of interest in the chart is that approximately 3/4 of the posts are by CrossRef members (TH, EN, RK) and 1/4 by CrossRef staff (EP, GB, AT, CK). Certainly CrossRef staffers are doing their bit for this blog. There's also way too many posts from me. It would be really interesting to see some others' views or observations per the CrossTech logo legend ("..., collaboration, ...").

I guess the real impediment is that one needs to request an account before posting. (Certainly there's no reason for any member to be shy about requesting an account and posting.) Note that I haven't considered the number of commentators to the blog which is larger than the number of posters. Also a number of CrossRef members are very active with their own blogs. Those blogs with a tech focus could (should?) be scooped up by a Planet style aggregator if there would be sufficient interest in maintaining a publishing technology hub.

One can only hope that the numbers will continue to grow (by direct posts or by aggregations) and that there will be a wider info share over the next couple of years.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)