CrossTech

The NIH Public Access Policy says "When citing their NIH-funded articles in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, authors must include the PubMed Central reference number for each article" and the FAQ provides some examples of this:

Examples:

Varmus H, Klausner R, Zerhouni E, Acharya T, Daar A, Singer P. 2003. PUBLIC HEALTH: Grand Challenges in Global Health. Science 302(5644): 398-399. PMCID: 243493

Zerhouni, EA. (2003) A New Vision for the National Institutes of Health. Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology (3), 159-160. PMCID: 400215

It's interesting to note that on PMC itself both the PMCID and DOI are included - but the DOI isn't linked. Two things occur to me - 1) should CrossRef map DOIs to PMCIDs and vice versa and make PMCIDs available in it's query interfaces and 2) shouldn't publishers ask that the PMC copy of the article link back to the publisher version? It would be very easy with the DOI.

Posted by Ed Pentz at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Following on from my previous post about prism:doi I didn't mention, or reference, the ongoing ISO work on DOI, Indeed I hadn't realized that the DOI site now has a status update on the ISO work:

"The DOI® System is currently being standardised through ISO. It is expected that the process will be finalised during 2008. In December 2007 the Working Group for this project approved a final draft as a Committee Draft (standard for voting) which is now being processed by ISO. Copies of the Committee Draft (SC9N475) and an accompanying explanatory document detailing issues dealt with during the standards process (SC9N474) are provided here for information.

Committee Draft 26324 is subject to ISO's copyright and is for information only to those interested in the project; it may not be re-distributed. This is currently undergoing the formal ISO voting process; the deadline for comments on CD 26324 from TC46/SC9's national bodies is April 25, 2008: please contact your national member of ISO TC46/SC9 if you would like it contribute to comments on this draft standard. Other documents for the ISO DOI Working Group are available on a DOI Project Register."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BISG and BIC have published a discussion paper called "The identification of digital book content" - http://www.bisg.org/docs/DigitalIdentifiers_07Jan08.pdf. The paper discusses ISBN, ISTC and DOI amongst other things and makes a series of recommendations which basically say to consider applying DOI, ISBN and ISTC to digital book content. The paper highlights in a positive way that DOI and ISBN are different but can work together (the idea of the "actionable ISBN" and aiding discovery of content). However, it doesn't go into much depth on any of the issues or really explain how all these identifiers would work together and the critical role that metadata plays.

Nevertheless it's great that the paper has been put forward as a discussion document - CrossRef plans to respond and be part of the ongoing discussion in this area.

Posted by Ed Pentz at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dan Cohen at Zotero reports (Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces) on a very interesting tie up that will allow researchers using Zotero to deposit content in the Internet Archive and have OCR done on scanned material for free under a two year Mellon grant. Each piece of content will be given a "permanent URI that includes a time and date stamp in addition to the URL" ( would Handle or DOI add value here?) and be part of Zotero Commons (things can also be kept private within a group).

Zotero Commons is related to but different from Nature Precedings and WebCite in that it's intended focus is on public domain stuff on researchers hard drives rather than someone else's material or website that is cited (WebCite) or preprints, datasets, technical reports that are given at least an initial screening (Nature Precedings).

Posted by Ed Pentz at 06:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Another DCMI invitation. And a list. Lovely.

See this message (copied below) from Douglas Campbell, National Library of New Zealand, to the dc-general mailing list.

(Continues)

Continue reading "DCMI Identifiers Community" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent popular interest in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at CrossRef- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

Continue reading "NLM Blog Citation Guidelines" »

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The InChI (International Chemical Identifier from IUPAC) has been blogged earlier here. RSC have especially taken this on board in their Project Prospect and now routinely syndicate InChI identifiers in their RSS feeds as blogged here.

As reported variously last month (see here for one such review) IUPAC have now released a new (1.02beta) version of their software which allows hashed versions (fixed length 25-character) of the InChI, so-called InChIKey's, to be generated which are much more search engine friendly. Compare a regular InChI identifier:

InChI=1/C49H70N14O11/c1-26(2)39(61-42(67)33(12-8-18-55
-49(52)53)57-41(66)32(50)23-38(51)65)45(70)58-34(20-29-1
4-16-31(64)17-15-29)43(68)62-40(27(3)4)46(71)59-35(22-30
-24-54-25-56-30)47(72)63-19-9-13-37(63)44(69)60-36(48(7
3)74)21-28-10-6-5-7-11-28/h5-7,10-11,14-17,24-27,32-3
7,39-40,64H,8-9,12-13,18-23,50H2,1-4H3,(H2,51,65)(H,54,56
)(H,57,66)(H,58,70)(H,59,71)(H,60,69)(H,61,67)(H,62,68)(H,73,74)
(H4,52,53,55)/f/h56-62,73H,51-53H2

with its InChIKey counterpart:

InChIKey=JYPVVOOBQVVUQV-UHFFFAOYAR

That's some saving.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Oh dear. Yesterday's post "Using ISO URNs" was way off the mark. I don't know. I thought that walk after lunch had cleared my mind. But apparently not. I guess I was fixing on eyeballing the result in RDF/N3 rather than the logic to arrive at that result.

(Continues.)

Continue reading "Oh No, Not You Again!" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Update - 2007.10.02: Just realized that there were some serious flaws in the post below regarding publication and form of namespace URIs which I've now addressed in a subsequent post here.)

By way of experimenting with a use case for ISO URNs, below is a listing of the document metadata for an arbitrary PDF. (You can judge for yourselves whether the metadata disclosed here is sufficient to describe the document.) Here, the metadata is taken from the information dictionary and from the document metadata stream (XMP packet).

The metadata is expressed in RDF/N3. That may not be a surprise for the XMP packet which is serialized in RDF/XML, as it's just a hop, skip and a jump to render it as RDF/N3 with properties taken from schema whose namespaces are identified by URI. What may be more unusual is to see the document information dictionary metadata (the "normal" metadata in a PDF) rendered as RDF/N3 since the information dictionary is not nodelled on RDF, not expressed in XML, and not namespaced. Here, in addition to the trusty HTTP URI scheme, I've made use of two particular URI schemes: "iso:" URN namespaces, and "data:" URIs.

(Continues.)

Continue reading "Using ISO URNs" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ISO has registered with the IANA a URN namespace identifier ("iso:") for ISO persistent resources. From the Internet-Draft:

"This URN NID is intended for use for the identification of persistent resources published by the ISO standards body (including documents, document metadata, extracted resources such as standard schemata and standard value sets, and other resources)."

The toplevel grammar rules (ABNF) give some indication of scope:

NSS     = std-nss

std-nss = "std:" docidentifier *supplement *docelement [addition]

Just wanted to quote here one of the funkier examples cited in the document:

urn:iso:std:iso:9999:-1:ed-1:v1-amd1.v1:en,fr:amd:2:v2:en:clause:3.1,a.2-b.9
 
"refers to (sub)clauses 3.1 and A.2 to B.9 in the corrected version of Amendment 2, in English, which amends the document comprising the 1st version of edition 1 of ISO 9999-1 incorporating the 1st version of Amendment 1, in English/French (bilingual document)"

As far as DOI is concerned there is nothing obvious to be learned. It is interesting to see such a level of granularity supported though. And since all these documents issue from a central publisher they can be prescriptive about the identifier syntax. Something which cannot be mandated for the many CrossRef publishers with their own commercial arrangements. Hence DOI is generally agnostic about suffix strings.

Seems to be a little confusion about the registration though. The NID was approved Jan. 15, '07 by the IESG and the IANA Registry of URN Namespaces (last updated Aug. 22, '07) lists the namespace "iso" with the provisional (unnumbered) RFC labelled "RFC-goodwin-iso-urn-01.txt" (being the -01 draft). However, the IETF I-D Tracker reports this status for draft-goodwin-iso-urn, which shows that a new I-D (an -02 draft) was submitted in Sept. 7, '07:

"A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), draft-goodwin-iso-urn-02.txt"

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it all went very quiet for a while but glad to see that the URI Template Internet-Draft has just been republished:

"A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.

Title : URI Template
Author(s) : J. Gregorio, et al.
Filename : draft-gregorio-uritemplate-01.txt
Pages : 9
Date : 2007-7-23

URI Templates are strings that can be transformed into URIs after
embedded variables are substituted. This document defines the
syntax and processing of URI Templates.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-gregorio-uritemplate-01.txt"

URI templates should be a very useful publishing tool. Templates are already used by technologies such as OpenSearch - see here.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seems that there's life in the old dog yet. :~) See this post about PURL from Thom Hickey, OCLC, This extract:

OCLC has contracted with Zepheira to reimplement the PURL code which has become a bit out of date over the years. The new code will be in written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)