The main issue we are raising with PMC, and that we will encourage publishers to raise too, is why doesn't PMC just automatically link DOIs? Most of the articles in PMC have DOIs so this would require very little effort from PMC and no effort from publishers and would give readers a perisistent link to the publisher's version of an article.

(Note that the diagram is an HTML imagemap and all elements are "clickable".)

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.

The plugin is targeted at production/editorial staff, but, of course, it will be interesting to see if any of this work can be pushed back to the author. I won't hold my breath on the latter score, but it will be fun to watch.

One thing I would note is that the NLM DTD can also be used in the humanities and social sciences, so, frankly, I think they should market it more broadly.

Anyway- the plugin can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

And Pablo has setup a blog where testers can discuss the add-in.

And there is also an entry for the project on the Microsoft Research site (an interesting place to peruse, if you have a moment).

Congatulations to Pablo and his team.

We'd be very interested in receiving feedback on this project - either on this blog or over on the project wiki.

A second roll out meeting is planned during the Sparc-08 workshops in early April.

"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."

This is a significant development as there is support for XMP profiles, to complement the existing XML and RDF/XML profiles. And, as PRISM is one of the major vocabularies being used by publishers, I would urge you all to go take a look at it and to consider upgrading your applications to using it.

One caveat. There's a new element prism:doi (PRISM Namespace, 4.2.13) which sits alongside another new element prism:url (PRISM Namespace, 4.2.55). Unfortunately the prism:doi element is shown to take DOI proxy URL as its value - and not the DOI string itself, e.g.

• Model #1
  <prism:doi rdf:resource=”http://dx.doi.org/10.1030/03054”/>
• Model #2
  <prism:doi>http://dx.doi.org/10.1030/03054</prism:doi>"

To satisfy Model #1 above a URI form for DOI would be required. And this is not the service URI denoted by the proxy. It would either have to be:

• Model #1 - Registered URI Form
  <prism:doi rdf:resource=”info:doi/10.1030/03054”/>
• Model #1 - Unregistered URI Form
  <prism:doi rdf:resource=”doi:10.1030/03054”/>

Any comments? Some guidelines from CrossRef would be useful - although maybe further discussion is required. It is, of course, a constant bugbear that "doi:" remains an unregistered URI scheme.

Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called 'UNIXREF". This was always available to regular queries against the CrossRef system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).

We've since learned that some user's are relying on the OpenURL's metadata feature to build proper references in situations where they have a DOI and that the older XML format is insufficient. Therefor I've added a 'format' parameter to our OpenURL resolver which allows one to request the more verbose UNIXREF. (see www.crossref.org/openurl)

As always please feel free to contact us regarding new features or changes to existing features that might be helpful.

Regards,
Chuck

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won't repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community.

I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG's Measure for Measure seminar last June. I think that, like most proponents of p2p distributed architectures, they massively underestimate the problem of trust in the network. They fully knowledge the problem of linkback spam, but their hand-wavy-solution(tm) of using whitelists just means the system effectively becomes semi-centralized again (you have to have trusted keepers of the whitelists).

And of course I was mildly exasperated by the report's characterization of one of the perceived "disadvantages" of the CrossRef architectural model being a :

"Centralised service hosting a large persistent store – with the need for a (possibly commercial) business model to justify providing the service."

Though DOI registries like Bowker and Nielsen Bookdata are commercial, CrossRef, the organization that services the industry that the JISC is concerned with, is *not* a commercial service.

Also if you replaced the phrase "justify providing" with the word "sustain", the sentence wouldn't sound like such a "disadvantage."

But aside from these quibbles, the report makes an interesting (if technical) read.

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.

I love the comment an authority:

"Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

And so I suppose this means they are assigning author identifiers....

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).

Patricia Seybold kicked off with a review of Web 2.0 that mentioned lots of sites and some good case studies:

Alexander Street Press (http://www.alexanderst.com/) - user tags combined with a taxonomy.
Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net) - share presentations
Threadless (http://www.threadless.com/) - design and vote on t-shirts

The most interesting parts of the talk were the case studies of how National Instruments and Staples have built a vibrant community of customers. Staples invited top purchasers on the their site to create product categories and sales went up 30% and now they use the categorization in physical stores and customer reviews from the web are used in stores.